– Source: Constance Mallinson reviewing Mira Schor @ CB1, artinamericamagazine.com
“It does not take much stretching of the imagination, to see in the urinal’s gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha.”
– Calvin Tomkins, art critic of the New Yorker, on Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917.
That is all very entertaining, hilarious even, if the deluded earnestness was not so depressing. An even more telling example of Artspeak is in relation to the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art aficionado Robert Rauschenberg, who is more famous for his exhibit Erased de Kooning Drawing, (a supposed drawing by Willem de Kooning which Rauschenberg erased). In 1951, Rauschenberg created a series of what he called White Paintings, The stated purpose of these pieces was to: “Reduce painting to its most essential nature, and to subsequently lead to the possibility of pure experience.”
Wonderful Artspeak – you would think he was actually saying something. This sort of kitsch, uplifting pap excuses the fact he did not paint a stroke. Of course, the paintings were literally blank. White, unpainted canvas. It was a brazen proposal that the very act of painting anything is a dispensable element of painting itself. Conveniently, he was also sidestepping the need to do any actual work. Were I the artist in question, what sort of reception would I expect for such audacious pugnacity, unveiling an unpainted canvas and basking in the response of creative conjecture to justify the notion that something artistic has happened? When in fact he has done nothing at all? The pretentiousness of these people is outside of understanding.
So sadly, and not surprisingly, the reviews of the time for the unpainted canvas art were overwhelmingly positive. Of course, the same would largely be the case today, providing they had the correct publicity and spoke in Artspeak, completely despite the fact they are literally doing nothing and that it is now a nothing-trick that has been done before. Being ludicrous and boring is what they are all about. The main defence of this cynicism, delivered through Artspeak, is that he has “made you think about painting”. Always, these attempts at a cheap philosophy, an appeal to the education of the commons by doing nothing and having no standards. It does not matter that he is displaying nothing, that he claims to be a painter while painting not a stroke. The opportunist hucksters who run our art institutions fall over themselves to worship these banal tricks so that they can survive on their gravy train of trend. You shock with ugliness or audacity, there is a collective Dadaist gasp and everyone moves on until a new low is discovered. That is pretty much the definition of art these days. Much like reality TV, or modern pop music, there is nothing at all at its heart. You see it and you feel nothing. It might consist of a moment’s fleeting entertainment but even then only in the sense of its audacious crappiness.
To quote more critical Artspeak of the unpainted canvas: “Rauschenberg was seeking to demonstrate audacity of concept, not painterly skill.”
If this statement was actually philosophically profound in any sense, I am not sure how or why it would not be better expressed in a book or essay, as opposed to a visual art carnival. But we all know that would not fly, as there is no meaningful idea, just as there is no visual art here. The audience is left to come up with its own ideas and thereby think it has been clever, which is extremely patronizing. Art criticism of the White Painting is incredibly thoughtless and excusing:
“…Rather than thinking of them as destructive reductions, it might be more productive to see them ... as hypersensitive screens ... the smallest adjustments in lighting and atmosphere might be registered on their surface.”
Yes, let us call them ‘hypersensitive screens’, pointing out the adjustment of light in the room. It is actually even more tedious to read the criticism than to view the work itself. What if it just also happens to be a blank canvas, put up by somebody pulling the wool over eyes desperate to be blinded? Does it matter that it could so easily be a hoax? Artspeak does not exist with and is not needed with pre-Modernist art. There is simply no way to rationally speculate that Pugin or David were pulling a fast one, as their work speaks for itself. Even if the all-white canvas is not specifically a con, what in particular is so brilliant about this puzzle of searching for its meaning? How does this trite game expound upon or rival traditional art?
In these situations, the artist himself has to be either a conniving opportunist or a narcissist who believes his every thought a phenomenon of brilliance. It is infinitely sadder to realise that Rauschenberg’s white canvas was offered up fully 60 years ago and nothing much has changed in the art establishment since. One might have hoped they would at worst recognize this as a dalliance and move on, a momentary and feverish pinnacle of irony. But no, both the art and the criticism have stayed firmly on this hamster wheel, only with added deceit, degeneracy and vapidity. They are caught in an eternal mental maze, a tautological word-trap without an exit that will only be vanquished by the imposition of a traditional order or the total collapse of our inherited civilization.
As demonstrated in Rauschenberg’s paintings, some pieces are so irreverent as to not exist at all. The absurdity and childish lack of logic applied here, indeed the lack of intellectual honesty, should be obvious. Typically, an Abstract Expressionist or Conceptualist master of Artspeak manages to create an intellectual impression by using crafted writing. Indeed, I am by no means the first to have claimed the only real creativity in contemporary art comes from the Artspeak or criticism, not the actual work. These critics and writers bound over each other, jubilantly, not only to justify the merits of these works but to praise them as life-changing events. It is perhaps in its obviousness that Modernist art gets away with perpetuating this bizarre culture of criticism. Certainly, the unpainted white canvas can, if you try really hard, reflect back some of the light of the room. But that this should be interpreted as an act of sublime prowess on the artist’s part is quite laughable, even completely idiotic to suggest. This smoke and mirrors nonsense is what passes for artistic intellectualism and has reigned undaunted for over a century. But how do they get away with it?
In his 1975 book The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe crafted the thesis that under Modernism, art had moved away from being a visual experience in favour of becoming a literary one.
“In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs… there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until… it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture… and came out the other side as Art Theory! … Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision… late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple.”
Wolfe very vocally criticized three prominent art critics whom he daringly named the kings of ‘Cultureberg’: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that these three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that — unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book — the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums and critics with outsized influence. This largely unknown but powerful group of influencers, similar to the notorious ‘Frankfurt school’ (along with many other solicitors of Modernism, from Rosenberg to the Guggenheim), work a slow-paced, unseen influence to push culture against tradition, packaged as a fresh approach to an eager youth. By redefining art the tradition becomes defunct. As to why they do this (if they even have any self-awareness), it would seem that by discarding healthy tribal ethics we are left more easily exploitable as rootless democratic consumers (with a faux-
individualist, corporate morality which interprets art and life ‘whatever way we want’, like a corny TV commercial). They can package and sell us anything now, as long as it is presented under this illusion of personal choice. The non-European art theory of abstraction accompanied by art-narrative (as opposed to beauty as standalone truth) is not an organically occurring trend, but a purposely injected cultural virus. The confusion and relativism of art-without-feeling helps them regulate and diffuse a European custom linked to national and religious custom. It may additionally be postulated as an elaborate economical scheme to manage the upper art market for the purpose of laundering money, with essentially worthless art objects exchanging hands at inflated, invented prices. In all these cases we are witnessing the exploitation of naturally competing cultures and classes living together and the washed-out materialist dead zone where they meet in the commons. Regardless of the realities of disparate world views, an honest assessment can only conclude that 20th century liberal-philosophical influence upon European art traditions has been nothing but a disaster. But of course, we can only blame ourselves for falling for it, for allowing our art custodianship to be in the hands of those who do not naturally understand it, or who do not share our love for it. It is we, ourselves, who have been careless and made a doormat of our charge, for following blindly the words of con-artists.
Of Wolfe’s kings of Cultureberg, by far the most notable and notorious would be the nefarious art critic Clement Greenberg. It was he who invented the language of Artspeak, cementing the new philosophy in the culture and academia. In a sense, by inventing Artspeak, Greenberg invented the vehicle for Modernism, which as an art is so objectively worthless it cannot exist without being propped up on this pretentious wordsmithing. The work itself is beside the point, secondary to the criticism in importance and creativity. So, unsurprisingly, Modernism as a serious movement cannot even be said to have been created by visual artists.
“With an ‘advanced’ artist, it’s not now possible to make a portrait.”
- Clement Greenberg
This is a telling Greenberg quote, which exposes the verbal manipulation of buzzwording phraseology at work. It is an essentially meaningless statement with no real rationale and no attempt to support the obscure claim with evidence or example. It is merely a celebration of the abandonment of standards, a bombastic lie that somewhere in the meaningless abstract is hidden the new tier of quality. It speaks of a standard unfathomable to everyone except these scribbling art critic ‘experts’, which is then feigned by the credulous curator splatter-gazers. Because art history texts do their best to muddle together traditional art and Modernist works, it becomes harder to find a clear originator of Modernism in practice. But with a bit of research for art that ‘does not make sense’, it would seem the very first abstract paintings successfully exhibited were by the Russian Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Greenberg and Kandinsky must be considered the forefathers of the anti-art movement that has made a farce of once proud and beautiful cities, galleries, concert halls, books and culture.
Our entire corpus of contemporary artistic methodology is more or less a product of Greenberg’s writing — all of it based on the style of Artspeak he founded. Today, it is the jargon of the entire art world: the critics, teachers, academics, historians, gallery owners, museum directors and artists who celebrate this endless verbal trickery. They stare at absurd objects and they muse, ponder and speculate, within the mental guidelines he has provided, and they think that is art. Greenberg’s theories gave post-war Modern Art academia its established respectability. Abstract Expressionism was really his masterwork, popularized by the conspicuous rhetoric he invented. The rhetoric is supported by the press that procures fame for our modern-day Warhols and Hirsts, whose rock star status for being art critic dupes may have originated our obsession with celebrity regardless of merit. These behaviours sprang from the cheapened, hyper-materialistic world abetted and exploited by Greenberg and those who followed after him.
To quote him regarding the absurdist movement Dada:
“Duchamp apparently realized that his enterprise might look like a retreat from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ art, and his intention seems to have been to undercut this difference by transcending the difference between good and bad in general.”
A very nice sounding and confusing way to say that Duchamp’s art is easy and bad. You must examine these words closely. One feels one has engaged in the art process just by studying this bold wordsmithery. It is nonsense to say something is transcending good and bad, as you are merely removing any standard or measure completely, a convenient way to transcend having to admit it is too bad to consider as art.
“Most of the Surrealist painters joined the ‘popular’ avant garde, but they did not try to hide their own retreat from the difficult to the easy by claiming this transcendence; they apparently did not feel it was that necessary to be ‘advanced’; they believed that their kind of art was simply better than the difficult kind. Yet Duchamp’s dream of going ‘beyond’ the issue of artistic quality continued, irrational and rhetorical as that sounds.”
Astounding — an artist going beyond the idea of artistic quality. What next, a dentist transcending the need to know dentistry? What use is it?
When Abstract Expressionism appeared it became widely accepted (amazingly) that in terms of new art, value discriminations had become irrelevant. That is to say, there was no way to determine ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. Which was very convenient for the inferior artist too lazy to apply himself. For the Modernists, this was the most edgy, avant-garde feat in art history. And the embracing of this movement by the cronyist art establishment sealed the careless destruction of a priceless tradition of painting that encapsulated European identity and moral values. I have my doubts today that many of Modernism’s early supporters would have done so if they could see the result today – that David has become the monster Goliath was framed as. So audacious relativists got away with presenting bad art by being brazen and using relativist philosophy. And Greenberg further tells us this new art is superior to all the previous art, because we had done away with standards. The world is a war of ideas. With value discriminations now irrelevant, anything was admissible. The only appreciable value becomes shock value — and they have now even run out of that. Yet still, the only art not admissible is that snobbish stuff with standards, which is to say real art.
No Koons, Rothko or Kline could survive without a constant diet of Greenbergian Artspeak. That, along with their audacious price tags, has fooled the public into assuming there is hidden genius at work but it remains simply a con. The Artspeak itself is so wordy, so boring to read, so deeply relativist in its morality that it is immediately dismissible to anyone who actually makes the effort to interpret what is being said. It is slippery in that they are so deep in the zone of mental fruitcakery, where a fleeing bird can perch on any branch it invents. Regardless, it seems to have worked academically and enabled a cataclysmic hoodwinking. The astounding price tags of abstract artworks are also attributed to money laundering, a very likely scenario considering the buyers, prices and product, and an interesting bonus to a great mountain of lies.
Artspeak today is often a printed competition between critics to invent quasi-poetic explanations for the existence of bad art. To re-iterate, all the simplistic Modernist compositions, splatters, boxes and lines, and obtuse architecture, justified by the tenets of Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism and later Conceptualism actually only exist to test the creative writing of respective critics – those who with ardent wordiness find ways to elevate the outspokenly stupid and ugly into the sublime and quixotic. Modernist literature beyond criticism, such as James Joyce, dispelled Hellenic heroism and despised gallantry. Arnold Schoenberg gave us avant-garde noise-music, which never took off as much as Modernist painting, as it is just not that easy to get people to sit through a cacophony of discordant noise-art. The Bauhaus edged architecture from the meritorious Art Deco into newer terr
itory from which we derive our horrid box-glass cities. These Moderns revelled in the newness of the self, a self that wallows in base urges and cowardice. The literature found ways to extoll only our faults, foibles, darkness and caprice.
Art was no longer there to inspire us to lofty heights but to remind us of our inherent flaws, of the insurmountable, of all that is wrong with us. Only the primitivist, the brutalist, the perverse should be extolled in art, because they represent the base ‘truth’ of a nihilist animal existence. Hanging a plainly beautiful Rembrandt or Ruskin in a contemporary gallery leads to confusion, unless it is defaced or its fragility exposed. How it must torture Modernists to be confronted by the classic art that has not yet been destroyed.
What is the end road of Artspeak? In essence it makes charlatans into artists by proving their incompetent agitprop can make it into a gallery, be sold and get good reviews. Their very existence is anathema to the hierarchical idea that there are tiers of quality in art – or in life, for that matter. In reality, fame and money have very little to do with art, or action. Even less so in a society that does not value art.
As Richard Wagner put it:
“That the Beautiful and the Noble came not into the world for sake of profit, nay, not for the sake of even fame and recognition.”
Everything is art is a heartwarmingly inclusive notion, but the sad reality is that it makes the reverse true: nothing is art. The anti-reality this creates requires a tremendous effort to maintain, expended in arguments, texts, devotees and various facets of disinformation. Modern art as an idea, or a conversation, has been amazingly successful in this regard, considering how much everyone hates it.
The truth is that art is craft. Its level of genius is directly related to the level of long-term skill appropriated and applied. It is a rational discipline that can be learned like any other. You can write whatever Greenbergian prose you like about it, excusing away the dildos and obtuse shapes as a poor man’s intellectual symbolism, but in real art the dissertation is not necessary.
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 4