The Great Debasement
How art-world institutions have corrupted the terms of the art encounter, for Tablet
A long-form essay originally meant for this Substack was published today in Tablet magazine. I hope you will read it. My subject is the visual art world’s ruinous and indiscriminate reframing of the artwork as a message-delivery system, an approach to art that can be summarized as follows: “One visits a museum seeking not aesthetic experiences but the feeling of knowingness—that placid state of mind, the elevated station. If one gets Rothko, and Sargent, and Nevelson, and Brancusi, one has them. Now, on to the new acquisitions.” I describe the utilitarian turn taken by institutional bureaucrats within museums and galleries, universities, the art media, and the nonprofit, for-profit, and state-run agencies and foundations that fund the arts, and offer one explanation for how the great debasing of art has come about. In illustration of the state of things, I describe two recently mounted major exhibitions: Hogarth and Europe at Tate Britain, which closed in March, and Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, currently on display at the Met in New York.
Here’s the opening of the essay:
Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of its audience. Paintings are their images; physically encountering an original is nice, yes, but it’s not as if any essence resides there. Even a verbal description of a painting provides enough information for its message to be clear.
Read it in full here (no paywall).
A companion essay, “On Craft; or, When Museums Sold Their Souls,” is forthcoming.
Thanks for the excellent article, I really appreciate your wisdom and bravery, and very much enjoy your work--even if after I read it I'm filled with rage and need to reach for the Ativan. ;)
When I try to make sense of what's happened to the humanities in the last generation or so, and the obvious full-on assault on the imagination and esthetic values, I think of it as a palace coup orchestrated and conducted by eunuchs in a harem.
I was a Lit major at a private liberal arts college in the 80s so I got to witness the birth of this malignancy up close, and I'll never forget when it dawned on me that the new dogma was just basically Leninist/Maoist ideology refashioned with French jargon and a heavy dose of White guilt.
So when I read some academic hack back then stating the party line as "works that have attained the status of classic, and are therefore believed to embody universal values, are in fact embodying only the interests of whatever parties or factions are responsible for maintaining them in their preeminent position,” (and they told me this is why I loved Shakespeare and Tolstoy!) it not only rhymed with Lenin/Mao, but was more or less the same ideology in new clothes. ("All literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared towards definite political lines." etc spoke the Chairman.)
But if you had told me back then that these people--the most miserable dogmatic conformists who seemed incapable of experiencing beauty or joy and who could turn Mardi Gras into a funeral--would one day rule our entire culture, I would have never believed you. But I guess a committed band of ruthless fanatics usually get their way, as they always want it more, know how to grind down their opponents, and are unencumbered by any sort of negative capability.
I don't know what else to say except that it looks like anyone with an interest in art and literature instead of the moralistic dogma of the White-guilt industrial complex will have to go full samizdat. That's why we're here on Substack with so many interesting writers and thinkers, why so many good books now are by indie presses, and soon I bet the best plays will be performed in basements and attics etc...if the Puritans or the Soviets couldn't kill off free thought and free expression, neither will their sour dour grandchildren, the Woke.
Thanks again for keeping the flame alive!
After reading your piece I looked up the NYT review of 'Carpeaux Recast' and was not surprised to find it closed by saying of the exhibition and the Met that this was "...a template that could have far-reaching applications for a critical rethinking of its permanent collection displays."
And I suppose it's true, ha, there has been so much suffering through the ages, why should museum labels not itemize it all? Start with colonialism and the slave trade, sure, but also, when we look at a Rembrandt drawing, forget about Rembrandt, let's hear about the nasty and short lives of rag collectors and the drudgery of paper making. For sculpture, what was the daily wage in an Italian marble quarry in the sixteenth century, and how much food and shelter did it buy? And then there was ultramarine, so prized by Renaissance and Baroque painters. It was made from Afghan lapis lazuli, but how much of the money Philip II paid Titian for the Poesie ended up in the hands of Afghan miners? Is it time for the Prado to pay reparations to the Taliban?