Is New Better?

Henri Matisse, Mme. Matisse (Madras Rouge), 1907

“Experiencing time forward doesn’t make the new necessarily better.” James Luckett said that. And I think many people would agree.

Yet “new is better” persists as a fundamental assumption in the way we think about art. Isn't it about time to let it go?

(Astute observers will recognize that, as someone working in an old and unfashionable style, I might have an axe to grind here.)

For a long time, in painting anyway, new was better. Or at least there were good reasons to think it was. This period lasted from, say, the middle of the 19th century to the latter part of the 20th.

During those years, the succession of styles conveyed an effective illusion that each new style was an advance over those that preceded it. And this illusion was supported by strong currents in the world outside of art.

The tendency to greater abstraction, for example, had an analogue in the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, in which time and space were as confounded as in any Cubist painting. Just as expressionism (and symbolism and surrealism) found an intellectual ground in the work of Freud and the psychoanalysts. Such parallels inevitably reinforced the art world’s belief that the new must be better.

But these synergies lost their momentum about the middle of the last century, just as painters began to realize that the formerly dominant trends of abstraction and expression, by then merged, had reached a dead end. For the first time, people began to say that painting itself was dead.

In reaction, artists turned to conceptual projects. (I think there is a strong parallel here to the current state of photography.) These, too, failed to provide a way forward. And when, about that same time, Warhol declared that everything in the world is art, a century of stylistic "progress" ground finally to a halt.

(Continued tomorrow.)