Judging democratic art. - book review

Few ideas have had more staying power than that of Art as an absolute - a permanent human reality, psychological or cultural, or both. It is commonplace to speak, for example, of the art of early painters of bison and mammoths in the caves of Lascaux, of the art of the fugue, and of the art of television, as if art were a permanent and unchanging human activity, expressing itself in different media over time but crystal perfect in its motives, its formal characteristics, and its functions. Museums make this Platonic concept of Art real by removing various objects from their original setting and assembling them in one place. In their original provenance, these objects served very different purposes: ritual masks, portraits of ancestors, tapestries, cult statues, sacred vessels, etc. But when they are merged with the paintings of Jackson Pollock, the brass statues of Brancusi, and other objects consciously designed as art, one gets Art, in the museum at least. Aesthetics, in the Kantian manner, systematize Art, laying down its formal characteristics and defining its motives and functions.

Democracy and the Arts,(*) a collection of essays by various authors, describes the effects of late-twentieth-century "hyperdemocracy" on the arts. With few exceptions, the authors assume the aesthetic view that there are modest but permanent standards, distilled from the history of Western art, by which all art in all times is properly judged. The authors are leaders in their respective fields: Robert Brustein on theater, Carroll Westfall on architecture, John Rockwell on "serious music," John Simon on film, Anne Hollander on fashion, Stanley Crouch on jazz, as well as others. And, almost without exception, they conclude that the radical "hyper-democracy" of late-twentieth-century America has had an invidious effect on the arts. The museum no longer serves its traditional function of reifying art, Arthur Danto tells us, since contemporary art's "primary ambitions are not aesthetic ... it seeks a more immediate contact with people than the museum makes possible." None of the other essayists goes so far as Westfall, speaking of modernist architecture reaching "its fullest potential as a nihilistic art serving morally impassive regimes," but they all lament the lack of "seriousness" and "deep views of humanity" in today's arts. Brustein, writing of the theater, speaks of "a major retreat - the surrender of most of the standards and values that make a serious culture possible."

The Israeli novelist, A. B. Yehoshua, by way of another example, argues that the novels of the late twentieth century have failed because they lack heroes, because they do not fulfill "the extensive human solidarity that a great novel needs to convey to the reader," and cannot express the sense of "elitist destiny" that writers need to feel "in order to have something meaningful to say to the world."

Simon, writing acidly and wittily, as always, believes that while it might be possible for movies to be art, film regularly fails to reach this status because it is the most democratic of mediums, subject absolutely to "the tyranny of the box office.... It is not in dinosaur movies that the intricacies of the human soul will be scrutinized." Mass democracy, most of the writers in this volume conclude, has turned "the whole [art] game into a costume party," as Hollander, not altogether disapprovingly, remarks in connection, with fashion. Simon goes so far as to posit an inevitable conflict between art and democracy when he remarks that true art is now, and always has been, "not democratic, not egalitarian: art is inherently elitist, exclusionary, despotic."

The quarrel between art and democracy is an old one, going back to the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of romantic art in the late eighteenth century. Human sensibility, so the theory goes, was so outraged by the smokestacks, the grimy factories, the slums of Coketown, that in protest the arts went, as it were, on permanent strike against the ways of life and thinking that characterized the bourgeoisie.

In earlier times, when the artist was supported by patronage, art reinforced the dominant social values, and we got the buildings of Palladio, the music of Handel, the paintings of Velazquez, and the plays of Racine. But, once art conceived of its function as radical criticism of the dominant social order, we got poets like Shelley and Baudelaire, architects like Pugin, playwrights like Ibsen, and painters like Van Gogh. William Morris spoke for all romantic artists when he said that "apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization." Artists who support middle-class social values and American optimism, like Norman Rockwell, to take an extreme case, have gotten very short shrift in the art world.

In the view of the writers in Art and Democracy, art is an unchanging light in a changing world. But, in fact, the definition of art cannot be dissociated from history. The word "art" was itself long synonymous with tradecraft and mechanic skills. The core of our Western conception of what might be called the "fine arts" - e.g., poetry, painting, music, dance, and architecture - took shape in the mid eighteenth century. The critic Paul Oskar Kristeller gave this historical understanding of art its classical statement:

The various arts are certainly as old as human civilization, but the manner in which we are accustomed to group them and to assign them a place in our scheme of life and of culture is comparatively recent. This fact is not as strange as may appear on the surface. In the course of history, the various arts change not only their content and style, but also their relations to each other, and their place in the general system of culture, as do religion, philosophy or science. Our familiar system of the five fine arts did not merely originate in the eighteenth century, it also reflects particular cultural and social conditions of that time.

According to this historical view of art, each time and place will create its own arts and its own way of judging them. And when we look at the American art scene in the late twentieth century, we find that it has created its own democratic art. The old "fine arts" persist, of course - barely if we are to believe Brustein and Simon; but they have been marginalized or degraded by the pressures of a democratic society. The work of many of our novelists - for example, Nabokov, A.S. Byatt, or Tom Wolfe - are surely as "serious" as Dickens and Flaubert. But their books remain entertainment, rather than literature, because society seems to lack the interest or the energy any longer to make literature. Life has gone out of the printed word as people read less and less. Theater has become obsolescent under the pressures of television and the movies. Painting is a commodity in a high-finance art market. Sculpture has adapted with site-specific sculptors, like Richard Serra, whose creations block our streets, and installation artists, who fill rooms with dirt and pile up bricks sprinkled with dog turds. Perhaps the only fine art that has flourished in late-twentieth-century democracy is dance, and it has done so by identifying with homosexual politics and eroticism. Walter Benjamin was right when he predicted, in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," that new technologies of mass reproduction would strip the "aura" from the older masterpieces of art. I have never been able to understand why a Marxist like Benjamin should object to making art available to the masses. Still, the mixture of proletarian politics and aristocratic tastes in art is not unfamiliar.

The real artistic energy of modern democracy expresses itself in what the old aesthetic order once scorned as "pop art" or "kitsch." Many of these arts - photography, films, television, amplified rock music, advertising (say some), and even computer games - are the products of modern technology, which satisfy, far better than the old authoritarian arts, the prime democratic value of "the Many." Modern production methods make these new arts available to everyone in cheap mass market forms that are frequently participatory or "interactive." Since democratic art is available to all, everyone is qualified to criticize it, and in many cases - photography or computer games, for example - to produce it themselves.

One of the writers in Democracy and the Arts, Paul Cantor, aware that the new democratic arts are primarily communicative rather than aesthetic, intriguingly suggests that recent philosophies such as "postmodernism" and "deconstruction" provide "the aesthetic logic of democracy." Postmodernism, Cantor argues, "accepts the radical historicity of all art," favors a "weakening sense of reality," and politicizes art by deconstructing "the difference between master and slave." Beckett's Waiting for Godot is Cantor's copy text, and while it is scarcely a piece of folk writing, it does reveal, at a high aesthetic level, the primary characteristics of the postmodernist art of our time.

It is possible to feel, as I do, that we have to accept that each culture and time creates its own art. But that does not mean we must believe that whatever history brings in the way of art is all for the good. Cultures create debased and even harmful arts as Well as noble ones. The best way, however, of judging their quality is not, I think, the application of the standards of other ages, such as the Arnoldian "high seriousness" employed by the writers in Democracy and the Arts to criticize democratic art. Rather, it would be more realistic to ask, "How well do the arts of a particular time serve the society which creates them?" In the case of the arts of hyperdemocracy - arts in which anything goes and total freedom of expression is guaranteed by the courts - the answer to this question is deeply troubling.

Violence is the issue at the moment. Violence of an almost unthinkable kind in our secondary schools has forced us to question the relentless fire power of our movies, the brutality of our television, the virtual killing fields of our computer games, and the revolutionary sadism of much of our popular music. Deafening rap lyrics like "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, kill, kill, kill, kill," program after program of people being blown away in washes of gore by ever bigger and faster guns, do not "please and instruct" in the manner that Horace once recommended. Of course, no one can prove that violence in art causes violence in life, but if art has any power at all, and those who manufacture it do claim great powers for it, then the effect of an art of violence must surely be to encourage what is worst in us.

Violence is not the only danger of techno-democratic art. Advertising we are now told is the essential democratic art, and if so, as seems arguable given the many artistic devices it uses, then it too encourages the worst in us. As the number of ads on TV increase, they crowd into our collective stories, and since they too tell a story, it is only a question of time until they become the story altogether. Will that be bad? For starters, we need only note that Madison Avenue is the most highly paid lying institution in history. Most of what it tells us is deceptive, intentionally so: It manipulates us into buying what cannot help us and what we do not need - what, in fact, may very well harm us irreparably, as in the case of tobacco.

Art gives the people what they want, say its postmodernist creators, and this may, sadly, be the fundamental fact of democratic art. But our artists insist that they are the source of new and revolutionary arts. They continue to play the role of the old poete maudit, big hatted and long bearded, as if they were still Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world." Norman Mailer harangues us from the steps of the Pentagon. Salman Rushdie mocks the superstitions of Islam. Andy Warhol screens Campbell soup labels, making fun of art and the gullibility that pays kings' ransoms for it. Mapplethorpe aestheticizes sodomy; Karen Finley dances nude covered in symbolic chocolate-blood drawn of women defiled by the phallocracy; Oliver Stone indicts the establishment by telling lies about the killing of John Kennedy.

But of course, it is all a colossal public-relations sham. We know it and wink at it. Byron no longer really dies at Missilonghi, he is a political "activist." Oscar Wilde does not go into the dock, he runs in a marathon for AIDS. Van Gogh does not cut off his ear in the madness of furor poeticus, but does drugs. Behind every successful democratic artist is an agent who gets the maximum price for his clients, a PR man who sees to it that adulteries, drug arrests, and other outrages are chronicled in every paper, and accountants who invest incomes that would astound Croesus to ensure maximum return.

And the art they produce is equally a manufactured commercial product. The art market drives the price of paintings of all kinds to dizzying heights; the subject matter of TV is determined by advertisers; producing movies requires huge amounts of venture capital that demands a high return; government and foundations subsidize the art that looks like it might "pay off"; even such low-investment art as novels are marketplace commodities.

In a curious and carefully concealed way, democratic art has become what would seem to be its opposite, an art of patronage. The reality appears most openly on TV. The patrons are no longer Maecenas, Lorenzo di Medici, or Louis XIV, but General Motors, Fixodent, Pampers, and Budweiser. Like all patrons, they get the art they pay for, and what they pay for is "the bottom line" - whatever will entice people to look at their ads and buy their products. The ads themselves push the "American Way of Life" - an upwardly mobile family with bright teeth, big cars, green lawn, dopey dad, clever but quiet mother, loud and aggressive children - as relentlessly as they do the product. The "Suits" interfere with the contents of the program only when it threatens to alienate its potential customers with exclusively frank portrayals of sex, radical politics, or religion. But anything goes really, so long as it doesn't offend. The aesthetic of democratic art is, alas, little more than: Will it attract attention? Will it sell more soap?

* Cornell University Press. 220 pp. $25.00.

ALVIN KERNAN is senior advisor in the Humanities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the author of In Plato's Cave (Yale, 1999).

COPYRIGHT 1999 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group