In his most recent New York Times blog, “Two Aesthetics,” Stanley Fish tells us that he doesn’t like the new New Museum in the Bowery in New York — or any of the art that’s in it, for that matter. Fair enough. But he can’t stop himself from sawing away at the idea that contemporary art is essentially awful. Why is it that smart people like Fish get their jollies by taking potshots at the easy target of contemporary art? Never mind that Fish wouldn’t know a good piece of contemporary art if it sat on him. Like all members of the profoundly-inclined intelligentsia, Fish stands at the ready to contemplate eternal beauty and deep meaning. The only thing holding him back is today’s bad artists.
Ever since the birth of modern art, art bashing by otherwise intelligent people has been as common as blue jeans. Very few people liked impressionism when it first appeared, fewer still liked cubism, and fewer people than can fit in my living room liked abstract expressionism. Today’s art bashing is different from these historical precedents, however. Contemporary art’s perceived shallowness supposedly actively prevents sensitive people (like Stanley Fish) from encountering and loving beauty.
In blaming artists for making stupid, shallow art over beautiful, meaningful art, Fish demonstrates how even smart people misunderstand how art and artists fit into society. Most artists, most of the time, can’t help but mirror the society in which they live. It’s a question of pressure, not choice. Whenever artists make art that goes against their times, they pay the terrible price of artistic oblivion. Moreover, since most artists are no better than plumbers, politicians, or academics at figuring out how to correct all the bad things going on in society, it’s only natural that most of them flail about fecklessly when they try to change society through their art.
The only artists who can ever change society are geniuses — artists who, by definition, are few and far between. Even Velázquez — the greatest painter who ever lived, and an artist who changed the very meaning of painting — changed absolutely nothing when it came to society.
Societies always get the artists they deserve. Western culture may be going to hell in a handbasket, but it’s not the fault of contemporary art or the artists who make it.
(Art homage by Brainstorm to Velasquez’s “The Rokeby Venus” and Rachel Harrison’s “Huffy Howler,” which is at the New Museum. Stanley Fish image from Fish’s blog at The New York Times.)
