Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799
I’ve been wondering what the consequences might be of the fact that art is no longer created in opposition to prevailing mores, but rather in complicity with them.
That this is a fact is, I think, beyond serious dispute.
Certainly it is clear that art used to be made mainly in opposition. The period in which this was true ran roughly from the political and economic revolutions of the late 18th century to sometime in the latter part of the 20th century.
Before the deluge, art was made primarily for patrons, whether religious, royal, or just rich, who generally got what they wanted. After, the roles of paying for art and maintaining artistic standards - such as they were - diverged. The first was diffused throughout the upper classes; the second fell to the academies.
This new system quickly proved incompatible with the dynamism of art in those days.
Beginning perhaps with Goya, and more clearly as the Neoclassicists gave way to the Romantics, the best artists found themselves in conflict not only with the preceding generation - as Delacroix with David, for example - but equally with the aesthetic paradigms promulgated by the academies, the French Academy most prominent among them.
And the depth of the conflict between avant garde and academic became more profound as the century wore on. Perhaps the most vivid example is that of the Impressionists. Buffs will recall that the first major Impressionist exhibition was the 1863 Salon des Refuses, so called for the fact that all the exhibitors had either been rejected by, or had not even bothered to enter, that year’s academic salon.
This phenomenon was not confined to the 19th century. Although the rate at which innovation was accepted accelerated in the 20th century, it’s instructive to recall that movements still took their names from the epithets of critics, so that even Matisse, that most lyrical of artists, was a fauve.
In short, art once progressed almost entirely in opposition to the aesthetic status quo.
Many artists lived their lives in economic opposition as well. There was, of course, no “art market” in the present sense, and the academies, which defined taste for all but a few of the few who could buy art, largely controlled what market there was. Thus, artists generally were poor, and the more advanced the artist the less the likelihood of material success, at least until late in life.
And whether out of conviction or simply as a consequence of artists' exclusion from mainstream society, much great art was explicitly counter to the social mores of its time. Goya's Caprichios and Picasso's Guernica come immediately to mind, although there are countless other examples, including Robert Frank's The Americans.
This all sounds a little quaint today, when every hedge fund parvenu is a collector, prestigious galleries recruit MFA students for solo shows, and art fairs exist mainly as venues for shameless display. But while I’d be the last to suggest that it’s good for artists to be hungry, I can’t help but wonder what the effect of all this prosperity has been on art itself.
Some say, for example, that the art of the last quarter century has been characterized more by pastiche, and even gimmickry, than by actual innovation. If so, is this simply a condition of postmodernism, or does it reflect, at least in part, the complicity of art and artists with the dominant paradigm, which is essentially one of commerce driven by advertising and public relations?
Of course, it may be that everything is as it should be. If the function of art is to express felt life, maybe we have just the art we should have. And maybe, like the new economic system we so desperately need, a new oppositional art is just waiting to arise.
Or not.
