Chasing It, Part 2: The Great Yawn
Diminished Returns From an Irrelevant Art World
by Micah E. Weiss
Oh, Madonna, what hath thou wrought in thy stretched and fading silicon and filler wrapped skin smeared in sweat-leather, bulbous, laborious, bouncing counter-rhythmic sagging squats? What hast thou become?
Over a century earlier, in late 1912, three American artists traveled to Europe to seek out works for an exhibition. Their focus was the latest Avant Garde works from the latest Avant Garde movements. The resulting show, held at the 69th street Armory in New York in 1913, was perhaps the most important art show in American history. The lineup of artists featured is doubly astonishing; first because of the genius arrayed in that armory building that year, but second, because many of those names had never exhibited in the United States before. The full artist list is exhaustive, but I thought it right to include Braque, Camoin, Cassat, Cezanne, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Duchamp, Gauguin, van Gogh, Goya, Kandinsky, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Munch, Picasso, Pissarro, Renoir, Rodin, Seurat, Signac, and W. B. Yeats’s brother Jack. Amongst the Americans included were Hopper and Whistler, as well as Walter Pach, Walt Khun, and Arthur B. Davies, the three artists who put the exhibition together. The event was not without controversy. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was on exhibit in the “modern” area with other works in the Cubist and Fauvist styles. Many movements were represented: Expressionism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, etc., but Duchamp’s nude drew the most severe criticism and extraordinary attention. It was hung in the room dubbed the “Chamber of Horrors,” the contents of which shocked the public, even drawing criticism from former President Theodore Roosevelt (in a short essay otherwise complimentary of the Armory Show) who commented:
It is likely that many of [the pictures] represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint. (Note: It is unclear whether or not Roosevelt was referring directly to Duchamp’s “Nude” or not. -mw)
Today, art historians consider this show a watershed moment in 20th century art, and tend to present the criticism it received as almost a badge of validation, proof of the art’s genius. Avant Garde movements from the late 19th century to the present have tended to embrace, and often even hope for, critiques like Roosevelt’s. The Futurists at the time, in particular, but later other movements like Dadaists and Surrealists, produced treatises and manifestos taking square aim at a bourgeois audience; these statements of purpose seem quite determined to discomfort and admonish the mediocre status quo the Bourgeoisie of Europe represented, and arguably maintained. Malevich, a Futurist of the Russian school (there was an Italian school, too), painted a blank black square canvas called–wait for it–“Black Square” in 1915, and Duchamp himself seemed determined to provoke the delicate sensibilities of anyone and everyone with his Readymades–found art objects like a snow shovel or bicycle wheel, and most infamously, in 1917, a urinal put on a pedestal and named “Fountain.” Later, Duchamp conceived of an idea called a Reciprocal Readymade where you take a Rembrandt painting, use it as an ironing board, then rehang it after it’s been used thusly. To my knowledge, he never actually produced a Reciprocal Readymade–though years later an interviewer commented to Duchamp that such a piece would be “rather hard on the Rembrandt.” An elderly, and refreshingly blunt and honest, Duchamp replied, “Well, we had to be iconoclastic in those days.”
“Those days” included several other watershed moments in the world of the Western Arts. First Schoenberg in Vienna, then Stravinski in Paris held now infamous performances in 1913 that led to audience riots. The Stravinski ballet The Rite of Spring is the more famous of the two incidents, though far less controversial a piece of music today (from riotously Avant Garde to featured in Disney’s 1949 film Fantasia–a pretty short trip from the edge to the mainstream of culture). However, Schoenberg, along with more obscure composers Berg and Webern, were experimenting with tonalities that shocked Vienna’s polite, Evening-Dress wearing society then, and continue to challenge listeners today. Schoenberg is difficult for even sophisticated musicians to wrap their heads around, and despite the riot, he never backed down from his experimentations. Good or bad, Schoenberg is characterized by music historians as a deeply serious artist, not a provocateur. Unlike Duchamp, Schoenberg did not feel he “had to be iconoclastic”; he simply was iconoclastic.
The art world then was distinctly different from the art world of today. Many more people–the folk, if you will–cared about art, and leaders like Roosevelt felt the need to care about art as a demonstration of leadership. Additionally, Art itself was going through a revolutionary shift, thanks in part to the industrial revolution and other factors. Modernism is a fascinating conundrum to unpack, and not the subject of this essay, but it bears mentioning that the taking apart and reconstruction of established norms and aesthetics characterize much of the fine art of the period, be it in painting, sculpture, dance, music, poetry, theater, prose, or the new arts of photography and film.
This process of tearing down to build up, a kind of cultural capitalism of creative destruction, along with the socioeconomic and political upheavals that characterized the roughly 50 years that preceded the Second World War, left people from all walks of life in the industrialized parts of the world feeling bewildered at the pace of change to their lives and institutions (for an account of the early part of this history, you could consult the book and accompanying documentary The Vertigo Years by Phillip Blom).
This change created one of the more exciting epochs in Western Arts and Letters since the Renaissance. American Literature in this period is densely packed with an extraordinary diversity of brilliant poets and authors. By contrast, all our current lit-magazine-led so-called push for more “diversity” in the arts has utterly failed to produce anything like the atmosphere of the Modern period. When Richard Wright, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T. S. Eliot, and Willa Cather are all attending the same party, a New York Writers Gala of a hundred years later can’t possibly compete.
However, the byproduct, or more accurately called, side-effect of the Modernist creative explosion was this feeling amongst audience members of shock. As Duchamp and many treatises mentioned above show, some of that shock was intentionally provoked, but Duchamp wasn’t typical. More often, as with Schoenberg, and I’d argue, most of the artists of the time we continue to celebrate, and whose art is still enjoyed by today’s audiences, were merely following their muse wherever she led with a newfound freedom and excitement.
Nothing epitomizes this conflict more than James Joyce’s Ulysses. In 1921, the book was effectively banned as pornography in New York State and, therefore, the rest of the United States (this was New York’s greatest period of influence on all things American). There are scenes in the novel of defecation, masturbation, and fornication, and perhaps Joyce should have known that some feathers would be ruffled in certain circles. However, by all accounts, Joyce, perhaps naively so, was surprised and saddened by the ruling. Yes, he “pushed the envelope” as the saying goes–the book is challenging, enigmatic, in Joyce’s words from his own short prologue-like introduction page, “filled with puzzles.” It is also full of humor, joy, tragedy, love, despair, and a deeply sensory depiction of life as a minute-by-minute experience. It’s many other things too, of course, layered as it is, perhaps joining more elements, from the widest possible reach across the spectrum of the sacred and the profane of any book I know of, and certainly more than any I’ve read. And it shocked some readers, for certain. But the shock of readers resulting from what Joyce wrote was never his primary aim, and no sensitive and honest interpretation of the novel could lead one to think so.
Twelve years after the ban, in the oh-so-slow courts of the United States, Judge John M. Woolsey thought along those lines as well, lifting the ban, and writing in his decision his own opinion of the work:
Ulysses. . . [is] a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind. . . In writing 'Ulysses' Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new if not wholly novel literary genre. Joyce has attempted–it seems to me with astonishing success–to show how the screen of the consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries as it were on a plastic palimpsest not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.
*sigh* What a final phrase. Here, let’s read that again: “. . . a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.”
It is well that such a case was adjudicated by a man of great literary discernment with his own claim to the talents of the wordsmith.
Judge Woolsey, perhaps remembering that Americans often balance the ornate eloquence of the poets with the blunt honest articulacy of a day laborer, concluded: “If one does not wish to associate with such folks as Joyce describes, that is one’s own choice.” Thus a masterpiece of the English language literary canon became available for purchase legally in the United States.
It is such battles and victories that came to characterize the Modernist period, almost like a formula: a new work of excellence is released to the public, the work experiments, and often breaks with established the acceptable aesthetic standards, the work creates controversy from the shock to the public such experimentations and departures create, time passes, the work gains in reputation for its excellence, and soon becomes accepted into the mainstream and lauded for the courage the artist showed in the creation of the work.
But a funny thing happened in post-war America, and the larger art world: excellence no longer became a necessary ingredient for success. In fact, as the broader public turned away from the traditional arts to television, the process seemed to simplify: a work is released to the public that shocks someone–hopefully a conservative, the work is instantly hailed as courageous and accepted into the intellectual elite culture, and given a write-up in The New Yorker or some other elite publication that’s “chasing it.” The muse necessary for artistic excellence and greatness is vacated, the process of absorption and consideration by critics and the passage of time abbreviated down to a New York Minute.
There are exceptions. The Art world, experimental music, contemporary authors and poets aren’t without meritorious efforts from what I’ve seen, heard, and read. But the glut of half-baked mediocrities and charlatans will be a lasting legacy of shame for our century, and not a little confusion for future generations who will wonder at how we Westerners went from the nova-like heat of Modernism to the desolation of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. How is it possible our culture could go from Hemingway, Faulkner, and Langston Hughes, and in a mere hundred years be left with the farcical con-man Kenneth Goldsmith, who, among other chicanery (of which he will readily brag) published a book of radio traffic reports, as well as a book of weather reports, all pulled from broadcast transcripts. I would link him for you, but he disgusts me too much, and might not survive my temper unscathed were he and I to “share space.” Most artists of today, however, merely bore, for there are many other examples that, sadly, the brilliant Mark Tansey and Walton Ford aren’t enough to counterbalance. It is a list of our shame. Robert Motherwell and the entire New York School who I have spent nigh on 30 years being assured “are really quite moving” by people who should know better; Yves Klein’s giant blue paintings with that special blue; a pile of candy dubbed “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, 90 separate cans of his own personal excrement (canned poorly, I hear, and now bursting from the cans in some museum somewhere. A consoling thought.); the Piss-Christ and elephant dung Madonna The Holy Virgin Mary, from some decades ago, whose artists I don’t respect enough to even look up, works tailor-made to gain controversy and recognition, but lacking any merit–the former is a modestly well taken photograph, the latter so derivative of Miro, the artist should have been giggled at from behind a champagne glass. Andy Warhol, period. Andreas Gurski’s banal photos. Can anyone explain to me what Rauschenberg said with his white canvases that Malevich hadn’t already said with his black one more than half a century earlier? Can anyone explain why Robert Ryman’s white square fetched 20 million dollars? It is perhaps the greatest insult of all that so much contemporary art has become derivative of itself. Derivative, and irrelevant, maybe because those who run these art shows can barely even find someone to offend or shock enough to get a headline anymore.
Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Orange) sold for nearly 60 million. He said of it “When I made 'Balloon Dog', I wanted to make a piece that reflected the joy of celebrating a birthday or a party. The Balloon Dog is materialism and monumentality. In many ways it is like the Trojan horse.”
Deep, man.
For the record, Jeff Koons doesn’t “make” anything–he has a factory staffed with suspiciously attractive art-students where he sends his cocktail-napkin-written ideas, and then the interns fabricate the art.
If the list above isn’t exhaustive of the last 60-70 years or so, I apologize–I am not in the art world so I can only speak from what comes my way. And isn’t that the most telling detail of all? I am a mere layman in the world of art, and more forgettable faire is all the art that has come my way, despite being a museum enthusiast, lover of art, and, until recently, a The New Yorker subscriber. I am the bourgeois that should be reached and shocked, but I’m not shocked, I’m just bored by most of it (caveat for my special hatred for Goldsmith). It’s dull, trite, hackneyed, and it won’t get banned, or censored, or anything of the kind, and it certainly won’t shock anyone, because no one is paying attention. The most “they” can hope for is that some conservative at Fox News will hear about their “art” and give them ten minutes of prime time coverage before being forgotten by that audience forever. Then the artists and their critics can do a victory lap, and declare the work legitimized. The conservatives (who themselves seem to look more bemused than truly shocked when commenting–able to gin up at most a kind of saccharine outrage) aren’t really antagonists in this relationship. They are useful idiots, acting as pollinators rather than critics.
The audience for contemporary art is minuscule: a handful of dilettantes and hangers-on in L.A., NYC, London, Paris, and Milan, and various urban centers of over-produced elites. This insular self-supporting art-world now serves merely as a tax-haven for the wealthy to exploit as part of their investment portfolios. Other than that? If you but peruse the Whitney’s most recent Biennial offerings as a sample (or Frieze, or Volta or other “important” exhibitions), it’s clear artists aren’t aware that no one is paying attention. Their “work” is presented, somewhat ironically, with claims to speak for the downtrodden, the ailing, and the infirmed–in the hopes of selling pieces to the upper class. Their arty-bollocks artist’s statements are packed with platitudes about “migrants” and genocide and climate change, etc.; these pathetic self-important fools think they are speaking truth to powers that don’t even know they are there, or, in the case of the millionaires and billionaires who can afford to attend these galas, are just looking for safe investment assets.
In 1937, Hitler held his Degenerate Art show, and the reactionaries of the Nazi Party dumped on masterpieces of Modernism, including works by Picasso, van Gogh, and Chagall, in favor of their suspiciously homoerotic, socialist-realism-inspired neoclassical Nazi-approved art. Forever after, as with everything the Nazis did, any form of imitation is, in their word, verboten. I have no intention of defending this show; however, it is perhaps part of our story. Is it because the Nazis had an aesthetic criteria, however narrow and reactionary, that the post-war art world has been afraid of asserting any aesthetic criteria at all? In a parallel to Chesterton’s assertion that when men cease to worship God they will worship anything, many of the members of the art world mistook the Modernist project and tried to reject all aesthetic criteria, but not with an eye towards reconstituting something extraordinary, or even original. It’s almost as if all art has been defined by Duchamp. As a consequence of this nihilistic pursuit, audiences ended up absurdly believing that Jackson Pollock was an artist. Over the course of time, the art world had managed to whittle down all of aesthetics into a single marker of distinction: shock. What was once a side effect has now become the last remaining aesthetic measure.
And what does this have to do with Madonna trying to dance at the age of 65 while crammed into a dominatrix outfit? If she is an artist at all, she is a pop-artist. How divergent are the cultures of Elite Art and Pop Art? I think the distinction is almost irrelevant–both worlds have converged to reflect the Elite Urban Mono-culture, and both favor Duchamp’s formula over that of the Muses. Madonna herself always had pretensions, and in a world of almost no aesthetic standards, one can make the case that pretense in any art is simply reality. One way or another, she’s an excellent example of the overall cultural problem.
I hesitate to link the clip I referenced at the top, but here it is. Trigger warning: it is not for the faint of heart. The costume and conceit brought to mind her speech at the Grammy Awards from a year ago. Madonna walked out on the stage dressed as a sexy schoolmarm (as seen above), holding a riding crop–pretty standard Madonna actually, predictable even. It was clear from her face that something terrible had happened that I will reference in my next essay, but it was the content of her words that interests me here. “Are you ready for some controversyyyyyyyyyyy?” she asks a less than enthusiastic audience, her “yyyy” failing with the trajectory of a dying quail. She then demands more noise from them, not the last limp demand of her two minutes on stage. But she continues with a new accent that sounds as if she tried to affect 75% of a classic Continental, like she dozed off halfway through a Katherine Hephburn picture: “Here’s what I’ve learned after four decades in music. If they call you shocking, *pause* scandalous, *pause* troublesome, *pause* problematic, *pause* provocative, or *pause to reveal the middle of her thigh in a way that isn’t at all reflective of the next word out of her mouth* dangerous, you are definitely on to something. *pause for lack of audience response* That’s when you make noise.” Yup, the audience really didn’t take her delivery as an applause line. “So, I’m here to give thanks to all the rebels out there forging a new path and taking the heat for all of it. You guys need to know. . . that your fearlessness does not go unnoticed. You are seen. You are heard. And most of all, you are appreciated.” Then what’s the point of rebellion?
She then introduced two “artists” I’d never heard of up to then, and that we all haven’t heard of since, to perform a pretty weak song called “Unholy.” Spoiler alert, the song is about naughty sex stuff–are you not shocked? Are you not entertained?!? Not really. I’m bored. I’m almost 48 years old, I’m a practicing Christian, a middle class father of three, with a house and a mortgage and debt I’m managing, and a nice normal job at the local public high school. Why are you boring me? I’m the one you want to shock! The performance for “Unholy” reflected the performances of the tour one of the so-called “artists” embarked upon after the Grammys: BDSM, near-nudity, not-so-subtle naughty sex stuff, all with a cartoonishly satanic sub-theme. During his tour shows, this British “performer” of nominal talent dragged his sadly pudgy carcass around the stage and baited the usual suspects in conservative media, who obliged him with their full attention. . . for a moment or two. Seeing the limited footage of this porcine gentlemen in speedos and nipple tassels reminded me of a line from my favorite television show from many years ago: “He, too, is God’s handiwork,” and my heart filled with pity at the “artist’s” desperate childish screaming exhibitionism. He was seen, and he will soon be forgotten, if he already hasn’t been–that is why I’ve not used his name in this essay. Why bother? Once one has channeled all the usual tropes into a single 15 minutes (thanks Warhol for your one lasting contribution not called The Velvet Underground), what else is there? Child sacrifice? What else you got?
Very little, it turns out. A soporific dullard, a one-hit wonder with little talent and no muse, no creativity, no art, not even any style. At least Madonna in her heyday (not whatever the monstrosity it is that she has become) had style. It’s been 70 years since Chuck Berry talked about boogying on the stairs and floor and all around, and Little Richard sang “tutti frutti, oh rootie,” and all the cool kids knew they were talking about sex. It’s been over 55 years since the Rolling Stones wrote Sympathy for the Devil. It’s been 50 years since Black Sabbath and Judas Priest became “edgy and shocking” bands, and 45 since Ozzie Osborn bit the head off a bat. It’s been 40 years since George Michael sang “I Want Your Sex” and Madonna pretended to masturbate with a pillow on live television, and over 30 since she released a book of pornography with Erotic Art pretensions called Sex replete with dominatrixes, et al, and about that long since Ice-T recorded Cop Killer. 25 years since Eminem put his girlfriend in the trunk of his car, and over 20 since we were led to believe that 50 Cent had been shot nine times or whatever, and less than 20 since Janet Jackson had a “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. *yawn*
For Madonna to stand up on the Grammy stage, a lauded figure in the arts from both Elite and Pop, on live network television and streaming all over the world, wealthy, idolized, with a fawning crowd of thousands, admonishing the audience for not taking her cues for applause lines, all while playing some kind of combination of rebel and victim, belies the fact that it’s all mainstream old news.
What else you got?
The chase is on for the next big taboo, and whoever finds it gets fame and fortune. Though the Romans are instructive here; they understood fame better than most cultures do, for they would remind the man who rode the seat of honor at the triumph: “All glory is fleeting.” No one epitomizes this sentiment more than Madonna, whose music outside a handful of songs hasn’t aged terribly well. She never had the best voice–her one-time competitor for best 80’s blonde singer, Cindi Lauper, is still far more talented a musician, her music aging far better–and Madonna’s acting chops, while serviceable, were never inspiring. The only real talent she had was that of reinvention towards the next “look” and a willingness to reflect the sexual shamelessness of our post-sexual revolution culture. These aren’t the kinds of artistic contributions that last. Fashion is often too shallow an expression to really touch us deeply over time as it is literally not even skin-deep. And Madonna’s ability to exploit her own sex appeal, like all sex appeal in all people however much it existed in whatever measure, has a pretty tough expiration date. Madonna played the maiden and the whore, she almost played the mother once or twice, but she refuses to play the matriarch with any kind of wisdom or grace, and the result is in a small way both pitiable and repellent, but mostly just dull.
Author’s postscript request: if you have found an artist from the last few decades that is excellent, whose work feels compelled rather than crafted, transcendent rather than empty or provocative, please send me that person's name. I really do love art in many forms, and wonder how many talented artists we’ll never know because of the state of the culture.