Postmodernism and the End of Art

To one ‘s shock and dismay one discovers, upon finishing Jason Newman’s article about postmodern art, that young Newman is a student journalist. This is shocking and dismaying because his article is so remarkably good. One cannot imagine an American student, no less an art critic, doing as good a job. 

Newman begins with a salient point. However much the world is gaga over Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can boxes and Brillo boxes—a critique of consumer capitalism, didn’t you know?— the artist filled his own home with the real thing, with art that had withstood the test of time:

However, when he died in February 1987 the world got a real look at Andy Warhol and what he really considered to be “worthwhile art.” Behind the doors of his neo-classical townhouse the rooms were not furnished by piles of Brillo boxes or indeed stacks of soup cans but objects of a rather different style. Classical busts sat on mahogany tables, portraits lined the walls, and on many surfaces sat fine antiques. Warhol had chosen to adorn his house with pieces that had stood the test of time, pieces that followed the old rules on aesthetic value, but most importantly pieces that would have been shunned in the art world he had created and dominated.

What is modern art? Newman tells us that it’s a fraud, a con perpetrated on unknowing collectors who want to feel like they are part of the intellectual elite. I know what you are thinking: it couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people.

He says:

… the mantra of the modern artist: willing to expose society’s greed, consumerism, and corruption so long as he receives generous compensation for doing so. The contradictions of Andy Warhol’s public and private tastes, along with the inherent contradictions present in modern art, expose it for what it really is – a fraudulent enterprise that does not stand up to close scrutiny; a con perpetrated by talentless hacks and the elitist snobs who give them both funds and oxygen.

One feels constrained to point out that a few collectors treat these artworks like penny stocks. They buy tons of it from young artists and hope that some of it will be worth a fortune. Of course, it’s all a game of musical chairs. You might end up with your walls covered in junk, looking like the biggest fool. Like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes—dutifully quoted by Newman—you will feel sorely inconvenienced if anyone, especially a student journalist, tells you that it’s all junk.

Such art is offered up to the intellectual elites, especially to the know-nothing elites called celebrities:

The fact is that from the time of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal to Damien Hirst’s pickled shark and beyond, the only people able to afford these modern art pieces have been the elite. An elite who, afraid they might fall behind the latest trend, nod their approval at a giant sculpture of a pair of buttocks (a Turner Prize-nominee), eager to show that they, like their elite friends but unlike the masses, “understand.”

It has all, Newman continues, lost the value to shock. It has become boring:

The whole modern art scene has become stale; the ugliness, the obsession with the scatological, and the gratuitous levels of sexually explicit content are now tiresome clichés. While conceptual artists no doubt like to see themselves as being experimental, revolutionary, and unorthodox they have simply become boring. From painting with it (The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili) to tinning it (Artist’s Shit by Piero Manzoni), the uses of faeces has well and truly been exhausted by these charlatans. Pieces that were once seen as shocking no longer shock, the taboo has been broken, displaying a sexual explicit piece is now no more revolutionary than painting a bowl of fruit.

Obviously, anyone can do it. It requires very little skill and no craft. It’s a world where talent does not matter:

Behind the grandiose pieces and the attention grabbing works created purely for shock value lies a very important question: “Where is the skill and ability in all this?” No skill is required to place a rotting cows head in a glass cube with an insect-o-cutor (A Thousand Years by Damien Hirst). No ability is needed to set up a room with a light that switches on and off (Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off by Martin Creed, a work that won him the Turner Prize). It is most probably the case that the electrician who installed said lights and the abattoir worker who severed the cow’s head possess more skill and expertise than either Mr. Hirst or Mr. Creed.

Among the intellectual patrons of this nonsense is the Frankfurt School. The thinkers associated with this school peddled Marxist fairy tales and wanted to stand firm against fascism. Recently, they have been treated as near-prophets for having predicted the rise of Donald Trump. Of course, no one cares to remark that their crystal balls became especially murky when they failed to understand the catastrophe of Marxist governance.

Newman describes the Frankfurt School:

Like the Dadaists, their genesis was in the interwar years but also like the Dadaists their influence really only started to be felt in the post-War years. They too came out of the first half of the 20^th century traumatised. They were appalled by the rise of fascism, but also crestfallen at the failure of Marxist-Leninism to deliver utopia. Having conducted a postmortem on Marxism, they formed their own new ideology, still heavily influenced by Marx but with a new emphasis on the cultural rather than the economic. Like the Dadaists, they also felt the old traditions should be thrown on the rubbish heap of history – faith, family, and the nation had to be destroyed. And, like the Dadaists, they were convinced the subjective was king and objective truth was dead. Affirmation and construction were to be abandoned for desecration and destruction.

Have these postmodern artists finally destroyed art. One expects that they did not. One hopes that a new generation will restore the value of art… that is, if they have the skill to do so:

Having succeeded in destroying the underpinnings of art, declaring everything to be art–and moreover good art–while emptying the word ‘beautiful’ of meaning, modern artists are now stranded on an open prairie. With no fences to restrain them or give them direction, they wander aimlessly, often getting lost in the process. The very term “art” now means nothing. For if everything is “art” then “art” is everything, therefore why define it as “art” at all? Why have galleries or exhibitions?