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March 20, 2009
In The End of Art Donald Kuspit argues that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Kuspit is a follower of a conservative apotheosis of modernist abstraction theorised and championed by the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg. Art has taken a wrong turn, gone off the rails. Kuspit's view that modernism good, postmodernism bad is similar to that of Hilton Kramer at The New Criterion.
Art, Kruspit argues, has been replaced by ‘postart’, a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity. Tracing the demise of aesthetic experience to the works and theory of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Kuspit argues that devaluation is inseparable from the entropic character of modern art, and that anti-aesthetic postmodern art is its final state. In contrast to modern art, which expressed the universal human unconscious, postmodern art degenerates into an expression of narrow ideological interests.
'Postart' -is a visual-arts category devised by Allan Kaprow, which Kuspit uses to pejoratively describe artworks (invariably postmodern) that express a rejection of the forms, methods, inspirations and aspirations of classical and modern art and therefore can no longer be called artworks in the true sense. Crucially, postart is art that blurs the distinction between everyday life and art. He says about the concept of “postart” simply put,
involves the “blurring of the boundary between art and life,” to use the title of his collection of essays. I would add, based on his idea that life is much more interesting than art, at the expense of art. I think postart is the gist of postmodernism, as the view that it involves the blurring of the boundary between avant-garde and kitsch suggests.
Kuspit adds that the integration of thinking and feeling remains a general issue of selfhood, all the more so in modernity, when the split is celebrated and thinking elevated over feeling. This occurs in art with the split between minimal-conceptual art and expressionism, with the former regarded as inherently superior to the latter.
If the visual arts are to be saved, then according to Kuspit the New Old Masters - a group that includes Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville - will be their saviours. The New Old Masters embody values that simultaneously evoke the spirituality and humanism of the Old Masters and the innovation and criticality of the New Masters, enabling them to transcend the suicidal intellectualism and socio-political fixations of postart.
So we have the claim that the rampant irony of post-modern art, combined with its obsessive navel-gazing, has turned it into a suffocatingly hermetic and an almost irrelevant enterprise. Missing from this is any ? From the this is postmodern theory's ideas of metaphor, deconstruction, transposition, recombination, and bricolage.
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Kuspit traces the genealogy of the postart aesthetic from Marcel Duchamp's announcement of an ‘entropic split' between intellectual expression and animal expression (which led to the reification of concept over form, and from there to a nihilistic pessimism) through Warhol's commercialism (which blurred the line between art and business) to Hirst's installations (which reflect postmodernism's preoccupation with the banal objects and situations of our everyday lives).