The Great Debasement of Art

Alice Gribbin declares that art is being systematically debased by social justice warriors. In their feeble minds-- and do not imagine that their minds are anything but feeble-- what matters in art is the message, the ideology that is being communicated by visual representation. 

This implies that there is no such thing as intrinsic aesthetic value. Art is great or not depending on the ruling power elites; certain people decide that art is great or not, depending on how well it justifies their social and economic ascent, and then they impose it on everyone else-- the better to maintain their social standing.

As for the question of intrinsic value, you might know, and I am only vaguely conscious of the fact, but the question of intrinsic value has a correlate in the world of money. Some people believe that gold, for example, is real money because it has intrinsic value. It is, as they say, forever. People therefore argue that the currency that governments print is, unless it is backed by gold, what they call fiat. Being as it is fiat, some countries can print as much as they like. Such is our current situation; if ever our currency ceases to be the world’s reserve currency, we will be in some serious trouble.

Anyway, the band of imbeciles who apparently run the art world, especially the world of art writing, galleries, museums, collecting and auctions, has decided that art is great because enough people say that it is great. And that it is merely an expression designed to glorify the power elite or else an expression designed to critique the power elite.

And they insist that all art communicates a message-- though they prefer the art that produces a message that they approve of.

Of course, there is nothing very new in using art to take control of the public mind. Twentieth century totalitarian dictatorships, from the right and the left, were happy to use art and advertising, to say nothing of education and the media, to communicate the message that they wanted people to receive. They insisted on having complete control over the public mind, whether through propaganda or through various indoctrination and brainwashing techniques.

You would think that these dictatorships justly arrived at an ignominious end, but the totalitarian instinct is alive and well in America. And, let us be clear, as Gribbin is, once you start exalting mediocre work because it communicates the right message or because its creator belongs to an underprivileged group, you are systematically debasing art, by teaching people how not to look at it and how not to think about it.

Today, far too many people, even in the business world and in politics, believe that it's all in the messaging. The Biden administration cannot understand how people can possibly think for themselves and rely on their everyday experience to form a judgment of the administration.

Somehow or other the upbeat messaging, the constant claim that the economy is doing great, has run afoul of reality. In this case, the price of gas at the pump and the absence of baby formula. The administration complains that it is misunderstood-- like a whiny child-- but people know better. And they have granted Joe Biden poll numbers that are worse than Donald Trump’s.

Most people can judge the effectiveness of economic policy through their everyday experience. It is far more difficult to judge the value of art. One recalls, wistfully, that Tom Wolfe once reported on a survey taken in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The survey asked the grandees of the art world which artists would be valued at the turn of the twenty-first century. The winner was: William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 

Nuff said.

Evidently, for those who were not Parisians a century ago, the ability to judge the aesthetic value of art is granted to those who have trained their eye. They do so by spending time looking at great art, at art that has withstood the test of time and that is considered, by those who know art, to be of surpassing aesthetic value.

As Isaac Newton once said-- he was not the first, but we need not go into that now-- we see further when we stand on the shoulders of giants. The same is true of developing one’s aesthetic sensibility. One sees better when one spends the time to ponder the works of the greatest artists and when one ignores the world of pompous self-important hacks who imagine, at their ripe age of twenty, that they have something really, really important to say.

I am persuaded, for what it’s worth, that today’s incompetent young artists produce conceptual work because they cannot draw. And they surround themselves with suitably talentless souls, people whose ideas still feel like they came straight out of junior high school, who extol their works as masterpieces.

One recalls, in a distant memory, of two aspiring poets who exchanged works with each other, and who concluded that each was at least as good as Keats or Wordsworth. The exchange of ridiculous flattery should have been seen for what it was, mutual exchange of puffery in people who had no real talent.

In the art world, talent is in very short supply. Such is as it should be. And yet, universities and art schools must stay in business, so they promise young people a glorious career as great artists, with big museum exposure, with lofty auction prices, with sage commentaries and critical encomia. 

The sad part is, the art world today is so degraded and so completely debased that it can produce precisely what the art schools are promising. It can make anyone into an artist. If you look at some of the nonsense that has been bid up to astronomical levels, you cannot but agree.

Anyway, have a look at Alice Gribbin’s analysis, offered in Tablet. She begins by saying that the only thing that matters to artists and critics and curators and collectors today, is the message, the big idea, which often is not big and not an idea. As always, it will be reduced to leftist propaganda, the sort that was produced by totalitarian dictatorships:

The institutions tasked with the promotion and preservation of art have determined that the artwork is a message-delivery system. More important than tracing the origins of this soul-denying formula is to refuse it—to insist on experiences that elevate aesthetics and thereby affirm both life and art.

One can blame the art market, but one must also notice that it is wildly easy to influence the art market. Two collectors can go to an auction and bid up the work of some junior mediocrity whose work they own, or even show. Thus, they will be increasing the value of their collections or shows. Art is not a mass market phenomenon. It is a small, tightly controlled market-- ripe for a hostile takeover.

Gribbin suggests that there is something like a vast conspiracy designed to promote junk art, art that has a message. Of course, this all comes down from critical theory, where wise old social justice warriors can find depths of meaning in a can of beans, and can make children think that they have actually learned something about predatory capitalism:

In the popular imagination, the great corrupter of the visual arts is the art market, with its headline-making, eight-figure auction house sales of works by living artists. The secondary art market is indeed obscene, but to blame the market for all that’s wrong with contemporary art is to disregard the no less pernicious motives of the apparatus of messaging that is foisted upon artworks by nonmarket institutions and their attendant bureaucracies. Private and public museums and galleries; colleges and universities; the art media; nonprofit, for-profit, and state-run agencies and foundations: These institutions adjudicate which living artists are backed financially, awarded commissions, profiled, taught in classrooms, decorated with prizes, publicized, and exhibited.

Obviously, this cannot but damage your ability to appreciate art. Hopefully, in time bad art will be forgotten and we will look back on the curators, collectors and critics as a bunch of dupes. Unfortunately, for now, if you just spent some $90 million to buy a chrome plated blown up bunny rabbit toy, the last thing you want to hear is that you are the biggest dupe:

There will always be artists who are, and those who are not, corruptible, whether their patrons are the Medici, the CIA, or the Mellon Foundation. Bad art, wonderfully, is in the end forgotten. 

As tiresome, didactic, and predictable as much contemporary art may be, I venture that a different corruption by the institutional bureaucrats should trouble art lovers more. While the market has turned artworks into mere commodities, the vast machinery of the art world has turned artworks into artifacts, by zealously, and almost exclusively, upholding the artwork as an entity with a message to convey.

Gribbin believes that this has been going on for two decades now-- that is, the art world is being taken over by ideological fanatics who know nothing of art but who are married to their beliefs. Oh, and who think that they are the vanguard of a revolution. You know which kinds of revolutions, the kinds that soaked the twentieth century in blood and destroyed hundreds of millions of lives. You would think that a failure at that level would easily be noted and that people would decide that it is perhaps not a good idea to reduce art to propaganda, but alas:

Instead, over the last 20 years the museums and galleries, universities, media, agencies, and foundations moved to shore themselves up as the rightful experts on art by asserting that an artwork is not a site of numerous meanings but that which contains a single blunt message. One receives such a message publicly, not in private. It is delivered with the expectation of being acquired whole, and of being understood quite as the artist intended. This is utilitarian art: Its value lies not in itself but in its moral or political content. The majority of artists supported and promoted by the private foundations and government agencies, universities, and galleries today produce work of this kind.

Whether through Thomas Aquinas or James Joyce, classical aesthetics has always asserted that great art does not produce a kinetic experience. It does not tell you to go out and do something. It produces an emotional stasis. It is there to be contemplated, because, as a Lacan once pointed out, it looks back at you. That is, it concerns you. It cannot do so if it is preaching at you and telling you what to think.

But, that is what today’s art tries to do:

Within museums, audiences are encouraged to seek not aesthetic experiences but the feeling of knowingness. Today’s educated classes cannot, as those in the 1950s and ’60s could, expect to build modest personal collections of contemporary art. Far better, though, the institutions insist, to possess art intellectually, to understand works once and for all. Artists can be mentally checked off a list: “I understand her paintings; his installations; her sculptures. I have studied their relevance. Their message is clear to me.”

Gribben is surely correct to say that this is coming from college humanities departments, like a sewer backing up:

The prevailing institutional orientation to art has seeped from the academy, like bog water, up and out into the public-facing art world. In college humanities departments, the main type of work carried out is best described as diagnostic. Students are taught to produce information about culture—including artworks—using analytic methods first propounded in the fields of gender and ethnic studies, and, most of all, cultural studies. Beginning in the 1980s, and certainly over the last 20 years, cultural studies critiques have become the dominant mode of inquiry in the humanities.

The mini-minds of academia, people who are teaching literature and art, but who know nothing about either, were gulled into thinking that deconstruction was a radical way of critiquing Western culture, one that they needed to support.

They did not know, and apparently, they still do not know, that deconstruction was invented by a Nazi and that it is merely a fancy term for pogrom. And yet, generations of graduate students have been trained to deconstruct the culture, to remove offending references and dangerous memes, even to burn books. And, let us be clear, just as the art world has been practicing identity politics by selecting works on the basis of the genetic makeup of the artist, without any consideration of aesthetic value, so too did the Storm Troopers burn books on the basis of the genetic makeup of their authors, without any consideration of the value of what was inside:

Art—just as billboards, contraceptive marketing, and horticulture periodicals—is considered a symptom or emissary of the society from which it emerged. Solely on the basis of what it demonstrates about its time and place is art a subject of study.

To do so, one needs to eliminate considerations of art’s aesthetic value:

Naturally, an artwork’s aesthetics are irrelevant in the cultural studies mode of critique; no one work of art is any better, or more significant, than another. In its predominant lower forms, cultural studies is a kind of supremely unrigorous social studies, practiced by people who believe all art is propaganda.

And besides, schools must be able to provide something of a career path for all the idiot social justice warriors they are producing.

Departments, under pressure from their institution’s upper administration to salvage cratering student enrollment, sell the humanities degree as practical, skills-building, the basis for a fine career. Scholars themselves attend to a decimated job market by selling their research—some might say cynically—as morally or politically urgent.

Since there are no longer any real jobs in academia, the products of American indoctrination mills have laid down roots in other areas. They have even undertaken to damage the minds and the aesthetic sensibilities of everyone else, lest they feel like the complete idiots that they have become:

Rather than continue in academia on the tenure track, successive generations of humanities Ph.D.s instead have become K-12 teachers, editors, cultural critics, arts administrators, and nonprofit workers. Almost every employee in the cultural professions has a humanities bachelor’s degree, and many have postgraduate training. Obedient as nuns, all have been trained to regard aesthetic experience with suspicion and seek from art a diagnosis of society.