Art criticism isn’t prophecy. Nevertheless, I am going to venture a prediction. Future observers, looking back on these tumultuous years, will understand that they marked an important turning point in contemporary art. They will be seen as that climacteric when the recovery of art, inaugurated some decade or two earlier, finally began to take root and become recognized for what it was: a counter-revolution in taste and sensibility. I am going to say a few words about some of the troops in that counter-revolution, concentrating in particular upon those engaged in that species of figurative painting that has been called ”classical realism.”

But let me pause a moment. I spoke of ”Recovery” and ”Counter-revolution.” Such recuperative events imply previous pathologies, earlier disturbances. And that, I believe, is the case. Whatever else it was, the twentieth century was certainly a cataclysm in the life of art.

Was it also a cataract of originality and innovation? Perhaps. But ponder some of the depredations committed in the name of art in the twentieth century. Then ask yourself what they suggest about place of originality and innovation in the economy of art. Maybe such qualities are not, or not always, as essential to successful art as we post-Romantics (late-Romantics?) like to believe.

Today, we are living in the aftermath of the avant-garde: all those ”adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of the last century, and that live a sort of posthumous existence now in the frantic twilight of postmodernism.

In part, our present situation, like avant-garde itself, is a complication (not to say a perversion) of our Romantic inheritance. The elevation of art from a didactic pastime to a prime spiritual resource, the self-conscious probing of inherited forms and artistic strictures, the image of the artist as a tortured, oppositional figure: all achieve a first maturity 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 French critic Albert Thibaudet summarized some of the chief features of this burgeoning tradition in his reflections on Symbolist movement in literature. Writing in 1936, Thibaudet noted that Symbolism ”accustomed literature to the idea of indefinite revolution” and inaugurated a ”new climate” in French literature: a climate characterized by ”the chronic avant-gardism of poetry, the ‘What’s new?’ of the ‘informed’ public, . . . the proliferation of schools and manifestos,” and the ambition ”to occupy that extreme point, to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea. The Symbolist revolution,” Thibaudet concluded, ”might perhaps have been definitively the last, because it incorporated the theme of chronic revolution into the normal condition of literature.”

Commenting on this passage in his 1972 essay ”The Age of the Avant-Garde,” Hilton Kramer observed that

the ”new climate” of 1885 has indeed become the ”normal condition” of a good deal more than literature. It has become the basis of our entire cultural life. Thibaudet’s ”What’s new?” is no longer the exclusive possession of a tiny ”informed” public. It is now the daily concern of vast bureaucratic enterprises whose prosperity depends on keeping the question supplied with a steady flow of compelling but perishable answers.

The problem is that the avant-garde has become a casualty of its own success. Having won battle after battle, it gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture 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 aesthetic buffonery. In this sense, the institutionalization of the avant-garde—what Clement Greenberg called ”avant-gardism”—spells the death or at least the senility of the avant-garde.

The road to this senility really begins with the ”anti-art” movement of Dadaism. For with Dada the ”chronic revolution” of which Thibaudet spoke is itself revolutionized, turned on its head. In this sense, Dada did not seek to provide yet another fresh answer to the question ”What’s new?” On the contrary, Dada sought to subvert the entire context in which the question gained urgency. That the extreme strategies of Dada, too, were quickly incorporated as part of that ”chronic revolution” suggests that Thibaudet may have been justified in identifying the Symbolist revolution as ”definitively the last.”

From this perspective, Dada, and every subsequent innovation, by definition appears as a variation on an already defined theme: an anti-theme, really, whose very negativity provides a foil for the ceaseless play of novelty. But in fact the incorporation of Dada into the fabric of the avant-garde did have consequences. For one thing, Dada altered the tenor of the avant-garde. Dada might seek to occupy extreme points, but it did so out of a systematic contrariness: it had no ambition ”to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea” because it had given up on the whole idea of art as a spiritual quest. Indeed, Dada was an art form that had given up on art.

Consider: in 1914, Marcel Duchamp dusted off a commercial bottle rack and offered it, tongue firmly in cheek, to the public as art. The public (at least the taste-making part of it) swooned with delighted outrage. In 1917, Duchamp upped the ante. He scrawled the name ”R. Mutt” on a urinal, baptized it ”Fountain,” and said (in effect) ”How about it?” What a delicious scandal ensured. How original! How innovative! But also how destructive of the essential protocols and metabolism of art.

But not, it soon became clear, as destructive as Duchamp had wished. ”I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously some years later, ”and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” Oh dear.

Duchamp had wished not to extend but to short circuit, to destroy, whole category of art and aesthetic delectation. Instead, his antics polluted and trivialized it. How much of contemporary art is essentially tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by Duchamp and his immediate successors? Damien Hirst? Been there. Tracy Emin? Ditto. Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger? Ditto, ditto. As the sage of Ecclesiastes put it, there is nothing new under the son.

The ironies abound. Today, ”Fountain” is (in the words of one reverential commentator) widely considered ”a recognizable icon in the history of modern art.” Given Duchamp’s iconoclastic intentions, what do you suppose he would have thought of Pierre Pinoncelli, the chap who has so far availed himself of at least two opportunities to attack this treasure with a hammer?

Now you might be tempted (I certainly was) to applaud this exercise of creativity and innovation as an exemplary instance of emperor’s-new-clothes vandalism. It is part of Duchamp’s legacy, however, that Mr. Pinoncelli should (surpirse, surprise) style himself an artist, be accepted by the public as an artist, and denominate his little acts of ”philosophizing with a hammer” (as Nietzsche said of his own efforts at creative destruction) as signal instances of ”performance art.”

Well, whatever the presiding judge thought of Mr. Pioncelli’s artistic efforts, he grasped the principles of private property with sufficient clarity to understand that chipping away without leave at a piece of plumbing valued at $3.4 million (and this, incidentally, for a late version of the blessed pissoir that Duchamp signed in 1964) just wasn’t on. The judge indulged his own innovative creativity and fined Mr. Pioncelli some £140,000.

These familiar but exemplary episodes from the annals of contemporary art illustrate Marx’s one indisputable contribution to civilization, viz, his observation that important historical events tend to occur twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

They also illustrate the cynical truth of Andy Warhol’s observation that that ”Art is what you can get away with.” Warhol’s own career, and, indeed, a large part of the contemporary art world testify to the power—if not the truth—of that observation. The sad fact is that today, anything can be not only be put forward but also and accepted and celebrated as a work of art. I won’t bother to rehearse examples: everyone here knows what I am talking about: Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethore, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Matthew Barney: the very names conjure up a cultural disaster zone. The question is: How did we get here? What had to happen that (for example) a bisected Cow in a tank of formaldehyde is accounted an important work of art? Well, that is a complicated question to which there is no short answer. But if one had to sum up volumes in a single word, a good candidate would be the word ”beauty”: What the art world is lacking today is an allegiance to beauty.

I know that this is both vague and portentous. But surely we are in a very curious situation. Traditionally, the goal or end of fine art was to make beautiful objects. Beauty itself came with a lot of Platonic and Christian metaphysical baggage, some of it indifferent or even positively hostile to art. But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.

But if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the traditional link between art and beauty, they have done nothing to disown the social prerogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something ”art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism—as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point.

George Orwell gave classic expression to this point in ”Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí.” Acknowledging the deficiency of the philistine response to Dalí’s work—categorical rejection along with denial that Dalí possessed any talent whatever—Orwell goes on to note that the response of the cultural elites was just as impoverished. Essentially, the elite response to Dalí was the response of l’art pour l’art, of extreme aestheticism. ”The artist,” Orwell writes,

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ”Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are

O. K.; kicking little girls in the head is O. K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

A juror in the obscenity trial in Cincinnati over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs of the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, the juror nonetheless concluded that ”if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

”If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they ”have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Part of the answer has to do with the confusion of art with ”free speech.” Another part of the answer has to do with the evolution and what we might call the institutionalization of the avant-garde and its posture of defiance.

You know the drill: black-tie dinners at major museums, tout le monde in attendance, celebrating the latest art-world freak: maybe it’s the Chapman brothers with their pubescent female mannequins festooned with erect penises; maybe it’s Mike Kelley with his mutilated dolls, or Jeff Koons with his pornographic sculptures depicting him and his now-former wife having sex, or Cindy Sherman with her narcissistic feminism, or Jenny Holzer with her political slogans. The list is endless. And so is the tedium. Today in the art world, anything goes but almost nothing happens. As with any collusion of snobbery and artistic nullity, such spectacles have their amusing aspects, as Tom Wolfe, for example, has brilliantly shown. In the end, though, the aftermath of the avant-garde has been the opposite of amusing. It has been a cultural disaster. For one thing, by universalizing the spirit of opposition, it has threatened to transform the practice of art into a purely negative enterprise. In large precincts of the art world today, art is oppositional or it is nothing. Celebrity replaces aesthetic achievement as the goal of art.

It is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades since has abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse, proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that systematically discounts the aesthetic.

Of course, ”beauty” itself is by no means an unambiguous term. In degenerate or diluted form, it can mean the merely pretty, and in this sense beauty really is an enemy of authentic artistic expression. But beauty is not always the ”merely pretty” or agreeable. One thinks, for example, of Dostoyevsky’s observation, in The Brothers Karamazov, that ”beauty is the battlefield on which God and the devil war for man’s soul.”

The point is that, in its highest sense, beauty speaks with such great immediacy because it touches something deep within us. Understood in this way, beauty is something that absorbs our attention and delivers us, if but momentarily, from the poverty and incompleteness of everyday life. At its most intense, beauty invites us to forget our subjection to time and imparts an intoxicating sense of self-sufficiency.

Art that loses touch with the resources of beauty is bound to be sterile. But it is also true that striving self-consciously to embody beauty is a prescription for artistic failure. This may seem paradoxical. But, like many of the most important things in life, genuine beauty is achieved mainly by indirection. In this sense, beauty resembles happiness as it was described by Aristotle: it is not a possible goal of our actions, but rather the natural accompaniment of actions rightly performed. Striving for happiness in life all but guarantees unhappiness; striving for beauty in art is likely to result in kitsch or some other artistic counterfeit.

The trick for artists, then, is not to lose sight of beauty but to concentrate primarily on something seemingly more pedestrian—the making of good works of art. The best guides to this task are to be found not in the work of this season’s art-world darlings but in the great models furnished by the past.

And this is where the renaissance in figurative painting comes in. Forty or fifty years ago, serious critics like Clement Greenberg could champion abstract art as a vital unmined aesthetic current and as a prophylactic against the depredations of kitsch. Whether abstract art, which after all has been thoroughly absorbed into established taste, still fulfills those functions is I think an open question.

In any event, as one looks around the art world today, one sees numerous if still largely unhearlded compensatory figures: artists who reject the rejections undertaken by the triumph of the avant-garde. Many of these artists have huddled in or around the rubric of ”classical realism.” One conspicuous practitioner is the New York-based artist Jacob Collins. If you haven’t heard of him yet, relax: you will. Now in his mid-forties, Collins is part of a small but growing band of artists who are revolutionizing art by reinvigorating, reinhabiting the aesthetic canons and plastic techniques pioneered in the Renaissance and promulgated in the studios of the Beaux Arts. It is a proselytizing coterie, which is why so many of these artists, Collins among them, expend as much time and energy teaching as they do on their own work.

My point is that the serious art of today tends to be a quiet affair. It takes place not at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, not in the Chelsea or TriBeCa galleries, but off to one side, out of the limelight. This is because real art tends to involve not the latest thing, but permanent things. Permanent things can be new; they can be old; but their relevance is measured less by the buzz they create than by the silences they inspire. In other words, the future of our artistic culture is not in the hands of today’s taste makers, but those whose talent, patience, and perseverance will ultimately render them the taste makers of tomorrow.

In the introduction to my book Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (2003), I noted that most of the really good contemporary art was taking place ”out of the limelight.” You didn’t see it in the trendy art emporia. It was not, usually, reviewed by The New York Times or other such organs colluding in the degradation of culture. The Times did recently get around to writing about Collins, but they were more interested in his living quarters than his art. Serious art today has tended to be a quiet affair, proceeding in an obscure studio in mid-town or even out-of-town. It measured its success less by the buzz it created than the silences it inspired. ”Tradition” was for its practitioners an enabling, not a dirty word.

All of this is still true. But the work of artists such as Collins (and their number is growing) suggests that a change is in the air. It is, I believe, a twofold change. On the one hand, the emperor’s nakedness is more and more widely recognized and whispered about. No sane person ever really liked the art-world pathologies that Duchamp and his ilk inspired—not, anyway, as art. As nose-thumbing gestures, they doubtless had their appeal, but no one ever claimed to be moved by their beauty, their sumptuousness, their aesthetic delicacy or humanity. But those are exactly the qualities that people are more and more craving in art. And so (moving now to the other hand) people are more and more celebrating art that embodies those virtues.

 

Picture: Jacob Collins – Candace (2006, Oil on canvas) Photo: Joshua Nefsky