ARTS
Depraved, moronic, grotesque
Roger Kimball believes the current art scene is good for cultural hucksters but bad for art
This being the season of Lent, it seems appropriate to step back for a moment in an attitude of stock-taking. It is not an encouraging activity. For when it comes to the art world there is plenty to make one feel penitential. Indeed, if you confine yourself to the official precincts of the trendy galleries and museums devoted to contemporary art, it sometimes seems that the entire lot has descended to the realm of the depraved, the moronic, the grotesque.
I thought about this recently when a press release from an obscure New York gallery crossed my desk describing a group exhibi- tion proudly devoted to the grotesque: 'Sex, politics, pigs, and food all mixed together in a very grotesque exhibition.' Among the advertised attractions were a photograph (by Andres Serrano of 'Piss Christ' fame) depicting a man having sex with a dwarf, a photograph of a naked woman in bondage with her nipples pierced, a 'Herculean wax sculpture the colour of ground meat', a painting of 'pigs and nudes feasting on each other with hot-dogs everywhere', and `masks in plexi-boxes symbolising the atroci- ties being committed in Africa and other Third World countries'. Yawn.
It is depressing enough, of course, when you consider high-profile events like Sensa- tion at the Royal Academy or the fiasco of the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery. But in those cases there is perhaps some conso- lation in the thought that philistines will always be with us, and that today, as in 19th-century Paris, they control most of the prominent cultural establishments. The only difference is that today's philistines wrap themselves in the rhetoric of the avant-garde whereas their counterparts in 1850 rejected it. The deadening attitude of absolute conformity remains.
It is when this philistine attitude trickles down to the ordinary gallery owner and aspiring artist that you begin to feel that things are irretrievable. I am not saying that the exhibition devoted to the grotesque was bad. It was not good enough or substantial enough to be judged bad. It was unpleasant, the way a nasty smell is unpleasant; but mostly it was just boring: a tired agglomeration of the tedious and futile, depressing the way a ragged home- less person is depressing.
I am not, I think, alone in finding myself vacillating between feelings of pity and and feelings of irritation when confronted with such sorry spectacles. There is something terribly sad about exhibitions like Grotesque (at the Gallery Stendhal, New York, until 22 March) just as there is some- thing sad about Gilbert and George, the Chapman brothers, about what has hap- pened to the Tate Gallery, and about the preposterous travesty of Sensation. There is a sense, I suppose, in which all of the above can be considered victims of their own fatu- ousness. But they are not innocent victims. Their studied perversity besmirches not only themselves but our culture as a whole.
The truth is that the prevailing situation is one that is good for cultural hucksters but bad for art — and for artists. It is espe- cially bad for young, unestablished artists, who find themselves scrambling for recog- nition in an atmosphere in which the last thing that matters is artistic excellence. When we look around at the contemporary art scene, we are struck not only by its promiscuous nature — by the fact that it is a living illustration of the proposition that anything can count as art today — but also by certain tell-tale symptoms. There is, first of all, its obsession with novelty. For those in thrall to the imperatives of the art world, the first question to be asked of a given work is not whether it is any good but whether it represents something discernibly new. The irony is that the search for novel- ty has long since condemned its devotees to the undignified position of naively re-circu- lating various clichés: how little, really, our `cutting edge' artists have added to the strategies of the Dadaists, the Futurists, the Surrealists.
A second, related, symptom is the art world's addiction to extremity. This follows as a natural corollary to the obsession with novelty. As the search for something new to say or do becomes ever more desperate, artists push themselves to make extreme gestures simply in order to be noticed. But here, too, an inexorably self-defeating logic `Can I borrow your curlers?' has taken hold: at a time when so much art is routinely extreme and audiences have become inured to the most brutal specta- cles, extremity itself becomes a common- place. Without the sustaining, authoritative backdrop of the normal, extreme gestures — stylistic, moral, political — degenerate into a grim species of mannerism. Lacking any guiding aesthetic imperative, such ges- tures, no matter how shocking or repulsive they may be, are so many exercises in futility.
It is in part to compensate for this encroaching futility that the third symptom, the desire to marry art and politics, has become such a prominent feature of the contemporary art scene. When the artistic significance of art is at a minimum, politics rushes in to fill the void. Indeed, in many cases what we see are nothing but political gestures that poach on the prestige of art in order to enhance their authority. It goes without saying that the politics in question are as predictable as clockwork. It's the political version of painting by numbers: Aids, the homeless, 'gender politics', the Third World, and the environment line up on one side with white hats, while capital- ism, patriarchy, the United States and tra- ditional morality and religion assemble yonder in black hats.
The trinity of politics, novelty and extremity goes a long way toward describing the complexion of the contemporary art world: its faddishness, its constant recourse to lurid images of sex and violence, its ten- dency to substitute a hectoring politics for artistic ambition. It also helps to put into perspective some of the changes that have taken place in the meaning and goals of art over the last 100 years or so. Closely allied to the search for novelty is a shift of atten- tion away from beauty as the end of art. From the time of Cubism, at least, most `advanced' art has striven not for the beau- tiful but for more elliptical qualities: above all, perhaps, for 'the interesting', which in many respects has usurped beauty as the primary category of aesthetic delectation.
Not for nothing are 'challenging' and `transgressive' among the most popular terms of critical praise today. In part, our present situation, like the avant-garde itself, is a complication (not to say a perversion) of our Romantic inheritance. The Romantic elevation of art from a didactic pastime to a prime spiritual resource, the self-conscious probing of inherited forms and artistic stric- tures, the image of the artist as a tortured, oppositional figure: all achieve a first matu- rity in Romanticism. These themes were exacerbated as the avant-garde developed from an impulse to a movement and finally into a tradition of its own.
The problem is that the avant-garde has become a casualty of its own success. Hav- ing won battle after battle, it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois cul- ture into a willing collaborator in its raids on established taste. But in this victory were the seeds of its own irrelevance, for without credible resistance, its oppositional gestures degenerated into a kind of aes- thetic buffoonery. In this sense, the institu- tionalisation of the avant-garde spells the death or at least the senility of the avant- garde. Many of these elements came together in that protracted assault on cul- ture we sum up in the epithet 'the Sixties'. It was then that the senility of the avant- garde went mainstream: when a gener- alised liberationist ethos and anti- establishment attitude infiltrated our major cultural institutions and began forming a large component of established taste. And this is where we find ourselves today, living in the aftermath of the avant-garde, when photographs of a man having sex with a dwarf or a painting of pigs and nudes feast- ing on each other is business as usual. It is, as I said, a situation that inspires both pity and irritation. But, as with a Lentan medi- tation, one may hope that reflection will spark not only recognition but also reform.
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