The Outlook for Art: Some Dead Ends and a Way Forward. Part 1

Mark Rothko, No. 6 (Violet, Green, and Red), 1951

Last month, Christie’s sold Mark Rothko’s No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), 1951, for $100 million.  So what? I said, and some in the art press may have been as bored by the news as I was.  Nonetheless, the obligatory tizzy could not be avoided.  Big numbers must be hyped, and this number was so big that even the mainstream outlets hyped it.  Never, in its previous seventy-two years of existence, did No. 6 receive as much attention as reporters gave it in recent weeks.  This awful truth leads to an obvious point: none of that attention focused on the painting as a work of art—as a trophy, as an investment, as a sign that oligarchy is alive and well, but not as a work of art.  

Likewise, press accounts of legal dustups between high-profile dealers and clients have nothing to do with art; they’re the art world’s answer to a Hollywood clash of the titans, Godzilla vs. Kong. And those lists of the 200 top collectors are no more about art than gossip columns are about the Dostoyevskyan depths of human character.  The purveyors of art-fluff know as well as anyone that they are in the distraction business, and they know better than some how big the market for distraction is.  So they churn it out non-stop, guiding art down paths that lead to dead ends: barren spots in the imagination where paintings and sculptures are no more than counters in games whose subtleties are crude in comparison to those of No. 6 (Violet, Green, and Red) or any other successful work of art. 

Life makes such dubious uses of art that some have tried to isolate it in its own, purely aesthetic condition.  Their most effective gambit was a slogan: art for art’s sake or, in French, l’art pour l’art.  Among the first to wield this delicate bludgeon was Théophile Gautier, whose preface to his 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin is a bitterly witty attack on the idea that works of the imagination have an obligation to improve us intellectually and morally.  Beauty and utilitarianism cannot coexist, insisted Gautier.  Yet art does not entirely lack a purpose; it provides pleasure, which he calls “the goal of life, and the only useful thing in the world.”  The English formalist Roger Fry labored as diligently as Gautier to disentangle art from ordinary notions of usefulness; and, like his French predecessor, he assigned it one exalted purpose: not to give pleasure but to express the “emotional significance which lies in things, and is the most important subject matter of art.” 

Fry did not try to pin down the nature of that “emotional significance.”  Presumably, it had something to do with “states of consciousness” of the kind induced in him by the paintings of Paul Cézanne, his favorite artist.  In any case, this “significance” was beyond the power of the articulate Fry to describe, for it is ineffable, some purely aesthetic quality or value or meaning to be found in the contemplation of an artwork as an artwork, the whole artwork, and nothing but the artwork. 

Rephrasing Fry, Clement Greenberg touted the “concrete, irreducible experience” provided by “pure art.”  And to stake an explicit claim on his place in the Gautier-Fry lineage, Greenberg said that “some day it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.”  What, exactly, was to come?  Nothing less than the revelation of painting’s essence, as the medium left even the slightest trace of politics behind and stripped itself down to its elements: “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment.”  The result of this “self-criticism” was the “autonomy” of images that refer to nothing but their own purely pictorial premises.

In the pure art that gave Gautier pleasure Fry found a portal to “states of consciousness” superior to those imposed upon us by ordinary life.  Though he never said what a pure, autonomous painting did for him, Greenberg implied with his tone and attitude that the effect was profoundly significant.  Transcendent.  And somehow tinged with the heroic, as if his effort to formulate a version of art for art’s sake were the cultural equivalent of Washington’s victory at Valley Forge.  Clement Greenberg, father of his country’s formalism.  Now, heroism is in the eye of the beholder, and I do not expect universal agreement on this point, but, as I see it, there is nothing heroic about detaching art from everything but itself.  This is not an original thought.

In 1865, the socialist politician and polemicist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared,

It is against the degrading theory of art for art’s sake that Courbet and, with him, the whole school called realist … boldly arise and protest.  “No,” says he  (I translate here Courbet’s ideas as embodied in his works, rather than citing them from his speeches): “no, it is not true that the only aim of art is pleasure, for pleasure is not an end; it is not true that art has no other aim but itself, for everything sticks together, everything is connected, everything is conjoined; everything has an aim in humanity and in nature.”

With their rationales for disconnecting art from non-art of every kind, the various proponents of art for art’s sake shuttle works of art off to a fancy dead end, an arid and constricted heaven with a place for nothing but purely aesthetic values. 

It is not hard to wrap your mind around Greenberg’s purist notion of a “strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension,” but when you do what have you got?  Not an illumination of your experience: our senses are interconnected and therefore pictorial space cannot be “strictly optical.”  To work your way through Greenberg’s theory is to end up with a handful of concepts relevant to nothing but the theory itself.  When art writers focus on auction results and other money matters, they strand art in a journalistic wasteland where aesthetic value cannot survive.  When Gautier, Fry, Greenberg, and their followers argue that we should see art as purely aesthetic, they smother it just as effectively.  For art comes alive only in the midst of life’s impurities. 

So I seem to be agreeing with Proudhon.  Art for art’s sake is indeed a “degrading theory” and “art has the objective of leading us to the knowledge of ourselves … in this way it contributes to the development of our dignity, to the perfection of our being.”  I do agree with this and yet here’s the twist: Proudhon’s approach can consign art to a dead end as barren as the others.  Next week, I will try to explain why I say that.

         

SOURCES

Théophile Gautier, “Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin,” 1834, Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism, 2 vols., ed. Eric Warner and Graham Hough, Cambridge University Press, 1983, vol. 1, pp. 158-67

Roger Fry, “Introductory Note to Maurice Denis, ‘Cézanne,’” 1910; “The Post-Impressionists,” 1910, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 76, 82

Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” 1949, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brien, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, p. 314; “The Late Thirties in New York,” Art and Culture, Boston: Beacon Press. 1961, p. 230; “Modernist Painting,” 1965, Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 774-79

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “Concerning the Principles of Art and Its Social Destiny,” 1865, Realism and Tradition in Art 1848-1900, ed. Linda Nochlin, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 1966, p. 51