Redeeming Art by Donald Kuspit

Author:Donald Kuspit
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth Press / Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. (Perseus)
Published: 2000-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Art at Odds with Itself

The artworld, as we know, is highly fragmented, not unlike a Humpty Dumpty that can’t be put back together. This has been benignly read as live-and-let-live pluralism, but I liken it to a pack of feuding sects, none of which talk to each other except with contempt. Just as, after the Protestant rebellion against the universal Catholic Church, religion split into a variety of churches, each claiming a monopoly on the truth—the smaller the church, the greater the monopoly, and the more outrageous its understanding of the truth (in comparison to the previous “universal” understanding)—so, in the aftermath of the avant-garde, the religion of art now contains a number of competing churches, each self-righteously claiming to be the true one. This is not the division of artistic labor it looks like, but a fight to the death for control of art history.

Two recent events give us some perspective on the conflict. On September 29, 1995, the Church of Realism formally lodged a protest against the Whitney Museum, noting its “pronounced bias [against] contemporary American realist painting.” The museum’s assertion that it has “a sense of responsibility and fairness to all the styles that at any moment make up the totality of contemporary art” was called “a lie.” The details of the indictment are worth noting: “The Whitney biennial—excludes art that demonstrates competence in drawing and form; excludes art which reveals a breadth of emotion beyond anger and irony; excludes realist art that is uplifting, positive, tender, or beautiful; excludes realist art that reflects maturity and humanism rather than juvenile irrationality; excludes art that has no obvious political, sexual or social agenda.” The other event was the trendy exhibition “‘Brilliant!’ New Art from London” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (October–December 1995). This supposedly iconoclastic group of mostly under thirty-five artists included such neo-art stars as Rachel Whiteread, who received the 1993 Turner Prize, Britain’s major award for contemporary art, and known for her inside-out casts of domestic objects and especially her politically motivated mold of an old East End rowhouse in the process of being destroyed, and Damien Hirst, whose September 1995 exhibition No Sense of Absolute Corruption at the Gagosian Gallery—an installation of four dead cows, placed so that they seemed to be copulating—was postponed until March 1996 because of health and environmental problems. (I remember seeing Whiteread’s house late at night in a driving rainstorm; I suspect it wouldn’t have looked as lively in better weather and during the day, when it was not dramatically lit up like a stage set.) With Marc Quinn, known for a self-portrait bust cast in his own blood, and Mona Hatoum’s use of an endoscopic camera to give us a guided tour of her intestines, the Walker exhibition was the Whitney biennial revisited. That is, a grungy version of the aggressively revamped, activist Church of Conceptual Art, which for both the Whitney and Walker management seems to have become the high church.

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