I thought I’d open my first actual post in nearly a month by reminding the world that I am still here. And so are you. This came to my attention when I was leaving the library last night; I noticed a copy of the New Yorker with a headline that said something like “00s: The World Didn’t End!” Hmm, I thought, was it supposed to?
But that’s exactly the thing. It was. Remember when everyone was packing up duct tape and bottled water for the impending millennial apocalypse as 1999 drew to a close, or how we thought World War III was just around the corner in 2001? And now that it’s become clear that we missed both those boats, we have a nice, friendly, Aztec-predicted end of days coming up in 2012, and an even nicer, friendlier Hollywood blockbuster has arrived to give us the play-by-play on the events that are definitely going to happen. Fear not, the end is near.
It’s a whole lot easier to face tomorrow when it’s not just another part of an infinite expanse. This phenomenon isn’t new. The early Christians were fairly certain the world would end in the year 1000 (a millennium after the time of Christ must have seemed fairly appropriate), and a fair amount of apprehension preceded the year 1666.
While on a marathon binge of 20th Century art theory and criticism this past month, I couldn’t avoid references to ‘the end of art’ or ‘the end of painting.’ Clement Greenberg notes a progression beginning with Manet (for the most part, though he does cite Courbet as the first Avant-Garde in Towards a Newer Lacoon), moving through impressionism, fauvism, and cubism right up to his time with Clyfford Still, tearing downs accepted notions of painting as it goes. Kaprow claims Pollock “destroyed painting.”
For Greenberg, modernist painting was a destructive process that Manet began by flattening the canvas. Modernity is little more than the devolution of its father, a self-bastardization. Art in his treatment was a family tree, and with it came a set of concepts to be one by one isolated, attacked and laid to rest.
Now, in 2010, it’s been quite some time since Pollock destroyed painting and art was robbed of its aura by the photograph and moving image (see Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Yet somehow, museums are still in business, young people still go to art school, old galleries are still showing new work and new galleries are opening. I feel rather comfortable in asserting that art is not over, and whatever comfort that was offered by the concept of an ending will prove false.
But it is different. What we are dealing with is not what the French Academy sent young men to Rome to study, or even what constituted the revolution that was the European and American Avant-Garde movements. It is maybe only by the tradition it so vehemently rejects that the wide range of creative production occurring today is still referred to as art, but nevertheless, there is something alive and well occurring under that title. In the coming year, I intend to explore what this is, why it is, and how it is. I do not claim to always be ‘right,’ ‘intelligent,’ or even particularly insightful at all times, but such is the generosity as a forum such as this.
