NEW.YORK
ART.CRIT

Somehow, it keeps coming down to words. Strange, no, when art is so rarely straight text—and, perhaps especially then, never just an argument.

Perhaps my most frustrating moment this year, although also a rewarding one, was speaking on a panel devoted to “the handmade.” Has anyone spent time with group shows and open studios filled with dreary, derivative painting? Is that seriously the answer to bloated, trashy exhibitions? And can anyone call the latter conceptual art, when it has hardly an idea in its head? My answer had three parts: celebrity drives those big shows, money drives celebrity, and it will take art rich in ideas and feeling alike to break their hold.

Now it happens again. I contributed, this time to an online panel, on the subject of “complicity.” Is art trapped by a corrupt system, or can art and ideas break free? No, I answered, to both. Overt protest, formalism, and working within constraints—what I jokingly called explicit, implicit, and complicit art—all have their risks and all have their place. And, sure enough, the loudest reply changed topic entirely, to my use of critical theory for vocabulary.

This site often returns to why art takes words and why I write. Looking does not come naturally, especially after Modernism and as art history fades into memory. That is why museums may try to rig responses with wall labels and press releases. That is also why too much art aims for show, at the expense of felt ideas. And again, when the show starts to look hollow or corrupt, as with a private collection at the New Museum or Jeffrey Deitch moving from Soho dealer to museum director, one had better not point the finger at theory rather than money. But I have said all that, and I shall not try to do better right now.

Nor does it help to single out for blame the subset of ideas called critical theory. It covers too much to mean much as a handle, it has made its contribution to the debate, and it has inspired some decent art. Besides, if it has become stale, artists may deserve some of the blame—for not creating work that turns philosophy inside out once more. This is a great time for art, judged by the new hybrids of genres like photography, realism, and abstraction, but diversity means drift as well. And there, too, markets play a role. They intensify the “originality of the avant-garde” to a perpetual search for the latest thing.

No one should have to defend the propriety of philosophy, when it comes to art or to anything else. It hardly began with the 1970s. In fact, others had asked, fairly enough, why I did not lean more heavily on the Frankfurt school rather than Jacques Derrida and Hal Foster. One can argue with critics, just as one can argue with Plato, Kant, your friends, or me. However, that means no longer demonizing them. And, again as with Plato or your friends, you may lose.

Of course, academic discourse is stuck in its own rut. No one needs another student paper comparing the treatment of women in Henry James and Charles Dickens. Still, the discourse has some lasting gains. When artists like Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida open a window onto the art world, they follow the growth of entire disciplines like museum studies. Other fields have felt the same pressures, and a good thing, too. International relations, for one, must now consider constructivism, Marxism, and feminism alongside the old poles of liberalism and realism.

Theory sounds impressive, but the divide between scholarship and ordinary criticism has never been greater. And that divide has terrible consequences for art. Even just before October, artists turned avidly to writers like Robert Smithson, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Michael Fried, Arthur C. Danto, Tom Hess, Lucy Lippard, and a dozen others as distinguished and committed to the artists they loved. Now magazines look and read like advertising, and artists worry more about who gushes about what show on Facebook. One can blame the obscurity of theory for the divide, but then it gets hard to blame theory for art. Rather, again money talks, by demanding criticism focused on thumbs up or down.

I can only say again that this is why I write. I want to work in that gap between art and words, in a way that is accessible but informed. Maybe Thomas Hoving created the dilemma by his own demand to work in that gap. He showed that a museum that does not reach out fails as a public institution, while one that does risks commercialism. Then again, elitism and popularity both have their merits, and Picasso over time managed both. If it keeps coming back to words, at least art still gets people talking.

And with that, I leave you for a trip through much of Labor Day weekend. I have also made this part of a longer article and apology, as my latest upload. It includes a post that first appeared on this page in an earlier form, about the explosive growth of this site. It also wraps in notes from three years ago on the site’s evolving aims, in light of an exhibition of Joan Miró. That material had bloated and warped an earlier attempt of mine at a preface to Web criticism.

For a show of emerging artists, “Greater New York” could pack far more surprises, but P.S. 1 has a few in store anyway. In the third installment of its “rotating gallery,” Sylvia Sleigh faces off against Judith Bernstein. Sleigh, born in 1916 in Wales, paints people in their home or garden, mixing photorealism with flattened perspective and brighter colors—like Philip Pearlstein with gentler shadows and body parts intact. Bernstein, working back in 1973, leaves stark charcoal on sheets that scroll down from the ceiling. They may wonder what they have to do with each other or emerging artists. I guess curators can be emerging, too.

So little is emerging at P.S. 1 under MOMA, and so much is unfocused, that one has to ask yet again if it has lost its way. Its founder has retired, only to reemerge in August at the Clocktower, where her Institute for Art and Urban Resources extended some thirty years ago. The painted stairwells, once a way of making the museum itself an emerging artist project, lie as dark, neglected relics. “Greater New York” barely reaches beyond the galleries as it did five and ten years ago, and emerging curators sound rather like sinister night creatures. Merger has led to one compromise after another, including devoting the old schoolhouse to MOMA’s permanent collection for “1969.” An exhibition from three years past, “Not for Sale,” has taken on sadder and sadder meanings.

Visitors may have another surprise in store, too. On summer Saturdays “pay what you will” ramps up to a healthy admission fee, in conjunction with “Warm Up”—a series of performances in the courtyard. Those who thought they had free admission from “two for one” tickets at MOMA will have an extra shock. Maybe P.S. 1 forgot that it created the courtyard and its summer installations as a gathering space. Maybe it missed that the Brooklyn Museum throws open its doors once a month to both events and the public. Maybe it no longer cares that some people need their weekends to see the art.

Maybe it forgot that it ever was a fabled alternative space or what that means, just as MOMA’s 2004 expansion can feel like an extension of its condos. Regardless, it truly has lost its purpose, without gaining an audience. The line on an August Saturday contained all of four people, and the next day I had almost the entire building to myself. Two families with little kids took the courtyard as a playground and then moved on, leaving its nets and sand like a deserted construction site. It says something that “Greater New York” now spans the summer doldrums. Perhaps a show of emerging artists, along with those at the Studio Museum and so many other spaces, will never generate the same anticipation again.

The New Museum called its own first crack at the idea “Younger than Jesus,” and P.S. 1 is now thirty-four. If it is to recover its vitality, it had better start thinking now. Its Web page for the rotating gallery even lists the curators rather than artists, as if art no longer matters. That said, Cecilia Alemani deserves credit for “The Comfort of Strangers,” through September 5. Sleigh for all her quaintness combines domesticity with nudity, with men strikingly more awkward but confident. Bernstein’s funny and savage totems are ambiguously screws, drill bits, armaments, and penises.

With a little effort, one can see them in dialogue, or one can see Bernstein’s twisting parallels in Jack Whiten’s thick acrylic abstractions from a few years later. One can almost situate Leslie Thornton’s black-and-white video in Sleigh’s interiors. In the prologue to her decades-long project, Peggy and Fred in Hell, a little boy and girl sing loudly, plaintively, and never quite coherently. I had wanted to see more of Bernstein’s larger-than-life series ever since her appearance (along with Sleigh) in Brooklyn, for “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” Her charcoal cuts deeply and yet spirals freely, and the white of the paper pushes forward with gleaming highlights on the illusion of ridged steel. It also underlines the message that, right now, visitors to P.S. 1 are screwed.

In the last few posts and my latest upload, I shared a brief critical history of the late twentieth century. As part of panel on the scholarly mailing list Empyre, I aimed to explore the dismaying and pertinent problem of complicity in art. As the discussion continued, I felt obliged to explain why my approach differed from that of others. Had I relied too heavily on a wave of developments in critical theory, starting around 1970, rather than Dada and the Frankfurt School, for example—not to mention just plain looking? Let me share my response with you, with a bit more history. My longer upload tries to weave this in seamlessly and without too much repetition.

First, the end of the 1960s represents a development of critical theory (an increasing buzz word) that scrutinized the “fine arts” and art institutions. While, for example, a short reader edited by Hal Foster, The Anti-Esthetic, included Jürgen Habermas with his framework of communicative action beyond art, other changes in the air included other future October editors in the domain of contemporary art, T. J. Clarke and others in art history, feminism, and media studies. Mainstream American philosophy offers a parallel in the institutional definition of art. This trend continues ever since.

Second, rightly or wrongly, critical theory foregrounded the very attack on purity as never before. That includes ideological purity associated with Walter Benjamin, formal purity associated with Theodor Adorno, and idealism associated with Georg Lukacs, regardless of their motives. I should not wish to focus on them exclusively, but it is useful as history.

Third, critical theory reacted to the realities on the ground. Art had seen Greenberg, with his assault on kitsch and with his Kantian influence. It had seen the “triumph” of American painting and the change from the “imaginary museum”of André Malraux in France, which John Berger furthered to radical aims in Ways of Seeing and Rosalind E. Krauss in her writing, to the very real museum since Thomas Hoving and blockbusters.

Last and most important, critical theory resonated with artists. Artists developed new approaches to appropriation, feminism, new media, Neo-expressionism, and earlier Fluxus, to name just a few. Alongside new media, old media become new. And both now assumed risks of commercialism and complicity in the arts that an early-twentieth century artist or philosopher could never, ever have imagined.

Yet this, too, was what I shall call B.C.: before Chelsea. One could talk of an institutional and economic “nexus,” or some other fancy term, but galleries still lay further downtown, and one could visit pretty much all of them comfortably in a day. Although Jackson Pollock had made a national magazine long before, much was still to come. That includes the shift to celebrity artists like Hirst and Dash Snow, star architects for museums, the assimilation of alternative museums by major ones, globalization, and the price boom. Recently a Chelsea gallery opened a show by twenty-six present and former staff members—surely larger than the entire staff of Soho galleries in 1975.

On the one hand, all this makes critical theory all the more more pertinent, even prescient. On the other hand, art’s success escapes the critique. Contemporary art at its most disturbing has continued to reject “purity,” with larger and larger installations with slick multimedia, almost like New Year’s in Times Square. In other words, be careful what you wish for.

In the abstract at least, and in museums, I am left deeply pessimistic. I just happened to be at Duke University as I drafted this, where the Nasher Museum is a largely empty tribute to family money. In galleries, though, I often come away elated. There is still a break with “purity” that opens possibilities without pandering. One can see it in a revival of abstract painting that is not all that abstract, as well as wonderful multimedia and photography projects. Still, it is not as if these efforts disrupt the system, fail to reflect it, or miss being absorbed by it.

Want a moral or two, then? One is that in the past it was plausible to set a strategy to avoid complicity. You could set yourself apart from commerce, or you could embrace it as a storyline. Neither seems all that transcendent any longer, although either can lead to some very good art. But the upside is more strategies available to address and refuse selling out. And, second, it is still possible for those of us not making art to pass judgments, even if that never sets us above the artists.

To wrap up the argument from last time, then, complicity in art has roots all its own. In fact, the more one looks, the more artists sound guilty as charged, and the more artists ought to want it that way. Michael Fried’s charge of “theater” was really rejecting a kind of complicity in Minimalism—as an interactive art form. Like much performance art and digital art, it needs the space of the work and its audience to complete it. In contrast, the real guilty parties tell the audience to shut up, listen, and applaud their work’s scale, expense, and commodity value. When Urs Fischer has a tongue stick out of the wall of the New Museum, the crowds near the hole wash out the interactivity, much like the crowds for Koons’s overeager Puppy in Rockefeller Center.

Take just one last set of roots. Explicit, implicit, and complicit all start with the idea of a ply, or fold. The explicit folds outward—or unfolds like a narrative. The implicit folds inward, so that one must tease it out. The complicit simply folds, like a poker player afraid to continue, or else it works within the system. This puts complicity in the awkward, guilty, and yet promising position of working with things as they are while not becoming absorbed into them.

Explicit art, like much political art, claims to stand outside the system but cannot always keep its promise. At the same time, implicit meanings, including irony and ambiguity, depend on an ideal of fine art’s infinite complexity for the discerning eye alone that may no longer apply. The very meaning of complicity makes clear why it is so hard to escape and so dangerous, but it is not always surrender rather than a serious artistic strategy for painters and conceptual artists alike. Folds can lead to the essential tears and fissures. They also suggest multiplicity—so that one can learn to speak not of the system or the art world so much as systems and art worlds. This is why institutional definitions of art break down, since no one is in charge of board certification or counting votes.

All this folding and refolding also has a history, apart from bad wordplay and the dictionary. For Marcel Duchamp and Dada, appropriation promised, explicitly, to make the whole idea of fine art obsolete. But Warhol showed that art could break all its promises and still persist, and when “the Pictures generation” repeated the strategy, it allowed art to exist, but with criticism as its implicit content. When the Young British Artists did it all once more, its shocks no longer aspired to criticism. Rather, Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, and Chris Ofili all rub one’s nose in the realities of sex, death, ritual, and consumption—while putting themselves on center stage. That puts them in the insular tradition of such British artists as Francis Bacon, and many find them decidedly complicit.

Complicity is more and more difficult to escape. A folding over could stand for the increasing ability of the system to enfold and encompass anything. A top critic, Jerry Saltz, recently offered on Facebook to read artist statements and prune them of “abstract” words. In print, he also called Puppy the work of the decade—with such adjectives as perfect, powerful, glorious, and phantasmagorical. I shall take scholarly discourse on the society of the spectacle over this nonsense anytime. Again, when vital critical vocabulary is under suspicion along with art, good readers should know better.

From Duchamp to shock art, no single strategy retains its power, but a strategy for art also opens new meanings with each incarnation—what followers of Jacques Derrida have called iterability or citationality. One may worry that shock art has proved wrong the previous versions, as escape from art or as criticism of art and society, but with luck each citation actually multiplies critical vocabularies of the future. Alongside new media, old media become new. One can only ask for a self-conscious complicity, determined to divide and multiply art worlds. One last lesson of the word complicity is that art is always both a private and public affair. It has greatest interest when it folds both inward and outward at once, which is why my latest upload concludes next time with a postscript on some artists who give it the old college try.

To pick up from last time, on complicity and conflict of interest in the art world, language is as tricky as history, because it reflects exactly the same conflicts. If art is complicit with the system, then logically it must also be implicit in the system. Conversely, the system must then be implicit or explicit in the art. This sounds like mere wordplay, but already the blame game has shown some limitations. No one would say that the system is explicit in the artist. You can see how lawyers and linguists earn a living, so I had better pull out the dictionary after all.

If I ask what complicit means, as opposed to implicit or explicit, it seems reasonably clear. It also has a surprisingly distinct etymology. It has a modern English cognate in accomplice. This makes sense, since the system is presumably the culprit, with the artist along for the ride. It also shares roots with a more innocent word, compliment. That, too, makes sense, if one thinks of the traditional role of court portraiture—or the extremes to which Jeff Koons will go to flatter his audience.

Note, though, the distinct ethical associations of a word’s twin roots. They correspond to the ethical history that I found in the twentieth century. For many an older Marxist, the system is criminal, with the artist aiding and abetting the crime. In turn, as for Walter Benjamin, the system may respond by betraying its abettors, not just by sentencing artists to prison or death, but also by making such ideas as fine art and originality obsolete. For him and others, before and since, artists can respond as well—by speaking truth to power. Feminism and appropriation art have had just that aim, especially for generation of artists starting in the late 1970s. I felt their urgency again just this past year with Jenny Holzer at the Whitney.

However, a compliment is also a nice thing, especially if paid the artist. And this corresponds to the murkier version of critical theory. People argue no end whether Andy Warhol and his successors compliment or subvert celebrity culture, Cindy Sherman compliments film noir, or Sherrie Levine compliments Walker Evans. Perhaps they would not be able to subvert their inheritance unless they did compliment it. No question, however, that they take the inheritance as a compliment to them. This has to do with what I have called the “postmodern paradox“—how, for all the antagonism, Modernism and its critics keep one another very much alive.

Look up explicit, and its cognates come from other sentences entirely. Chief among them is to explain. Political art tries to explain something, but so does formalism, in making explicit the nature of a medium. Both promise alternatives to complicity, as when Clement Greenberg distinguishes fine art and kitsch. At the same time, art can be too explicit—the heart of all the old complaints about formalism and political art alike. Similar associations come with sexually explicit imagery, as both daring and way too obvious.

Art, then, has an obligation to leave a good deal implicit. To continue the associations, it engages in another kind of criminal conduct, duplicity, and a good thing, too. Plato rejected art for lying, even while he was telling stories, but formalism fails in its own goals of making art’s nature explicit by refusing to accept a fiction. When Michael Fried traced the notion of theatricality from Rococo morality tales through Romanticism’s inward turn and finally to Minimalism’s stark public places, he was asking if one could morally accept fictions. To sort out which of the charges still hold, I want to pull things together next time by going one step past distinct cognates and shared roots to answers for artists.

Onto the battle over complicity in the art world! But before the language lessons promised last time, the plight of those artists. It sounds like Postmodernism 101, but forgive the recap before I look for another layer of history in the dictionary. Where Johanna Drucker, to name just one scholar, has taken up complicity with the culture industry, here I shall focus on contexts of politics and the art world.

Surely some artists are complicit, or at least other artists and the public like to think so. Many outside the arts, like some critics, think of displays of dead sharks, reality TV about art, and museum blockbusters as modern-day geek shows, with dealers and museums as carnival barkers. Most artists think of them as a diversion of resources and attention from their own aspirations. And then the public flocks to see them, artists compete to enter them, and critics write about them with gusto. These are not hypocrisy. I know no insincere critics, and artists deserve to earn a living from what they love.

As for the system, art is of course a product in a capitalist society. It is also a successful enough society, give or take human suffering, to profit from even its critics. Auction prices soar for Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, sometimes in collaboration, who began respectively in commercial art and on the street—and who never let others forget it. Nonprofits increasingly play by the same rules, like the Nasher Museum or the move of Jeffrey Deitch from Soho dealer to LA MOCA. Big museums like MOMA absorb alternative spaces like P.S. 1, while the New Museum now flaunts a star director, a star collector, star artists, and star architects. Attributions to Velázquez, Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Vermeer that museums rejected thirty years ago now draw crowds and make curatorial careers.

Many on the outside would go further. Works of art represent, critique, and celebrate, and that ambivalence permeates art at its worst and at its best. In the same way, art of the past gave past societies their image. To complicate matters, many—including many artists in traditional media—think of critical theory as part of the circus. They see even the most palpable, lavish, and visceral installations as heirs to conceptual art. It may seem strange to attack capitalism or artists for thinking too hard, but they do.

To complicate things further, critical theory also insists that art reflects its time and place. Art must and it should. And understanding that deepens an appreciation of art past and present. But a deeper appreciation is not the same as mere celebration, for it points to fissures within political and social norms. One can understand Rembrandt as inescapably of the Dutch Baroque and, increasingly, a commercial failure. One can see art as at once a product of its age, constituting its age, and rebelling against its age.

Understandings like these are, again, neither contradictory nor hypocritical. If anything, they are a cliché, and I apologize for having to run through them all. One can see the bad and the good side of the story as two versions of Modernism and Postmodernism. The first echoes Marxism, feminism, gender theory, and other demands for change. The second accepts all the above, plus philosophical pragmatism and deconstruction. One can see them, in fact, as alternative definitions of complicit, so let me circle back next time to the word itself.