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The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist
The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist examines the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic premises for avant-garde art and its subsequent evolution and corruption in the late twentieth century. Arguing that modernist art is essentially therapeutic in intention, both towards self and society, Donald Kuspit further posits that neo-avant-garde, or post-modern art, at once mocks and denies the possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and fortune are valued above anything else. Stripping avant-garde art of its missionary, therapeutic intention, neo-avant-garde art instead converts it into a cliché of creative novelty or ironical value for its fashionable look. Moreover, it destroys the precarious balance of artistic narcissism and social empathy that characterizes modern art, tilting it cynically towards the former. Incorporating psychoanalytic ideas, particularly those concerned with narcissism, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist offers a reinterpretation of modern art history. Donald Kuspit, one of America's foremost art critics, is a contributing editor to Artforum and the author of many books.
- GenresArt
188 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Donald B. Kuspit
274 books17 followersDonald Kuspit is an American art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and former professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts. Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics.
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December 11, 2016
The apotheosis of the avant-garde or modernist artist as the symbol of heroic resistance to all that is oppressive and corrupt in bourgeois civilization, if not as its savoir, has been until recently the major way of stating the significance of modern art. So-called postmodernism or neo-avant-garde art is the symbol of its passing, the indication that the idol has feet of clay.
The avant-garde artist is conceived as a kind of Promethean adventurer, an individualist and risk taker in a sheepish society, an Overman bringing to the more timid world of the herdman, to use Nietzsche's distinction, a new kind of fire, burning away blinding darkness and affording new insight as well as sight, a new vision of what art as well as life can be—a comprehensive new enlightenment.
Not only has the artist been sharply differentiated from and elevated above others, but those others, but those others have been regarded as too ordinary to comprehend how extraordinary it is to be an artist—although they are obliged to be their audience, in homage to their creativity, if not necessarily to the particulars of their production. They are obliged to give them fame simply for their being, even if they can make no sense of it.
This book is about the simultaneity of this respect and doubt: it is about the new ambivalence about the artist—in contrast to the old ambivalence, in which their deviance and outsiderness were unconsciously admired and envied even as they were consciously deplored. Today, the artist remains an unconventional hero, but he is also perceived as a pretender—all too stylized and privileged in his unconventionality—if not quite a conventional fraud.
If art for art's sake implies narcissism, it is secondary or defensive narcissism, rather than the consummate, cynical, self-celebratory narcissism of neo-avant-garde art.
Art for art's sake is art's final defense against the threat posed to it by modern science and technology, which seems to deprive it of any realistic function, even of any reason for being. Art for art's sake asserts that art may no longer be the most adequate expression of external reality, but that it is still the best expression of internal reality.
Fear of decadence and the wish for rejuvenation haunt—indeed, terrorize—modern thinking about art. Nietzsche's conception of art as the only means of transmuting values—of rescuing life from decadence by rejuvenating it—epitomizes this dialectic of decadence.
"A painting being auctioned off for 50 million has more impact on how art is perceived and understood today than the actual art...produced."
For the neo-avant-garde artist, the artist has an inherent right to fame simply by reason of being an artist, which is transparently narcissistic assumption. They begin their career as a self-styled overman, presupposing that the artist is the primordial creator—a misconception ironically created in the first place by the avant-garde artist.
Fame, we might say, is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure.
Duchamp: "The artist's attitude counts more than their art."
Picasso: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon."
Distorting is a characteristic of the 20th century, and with all the painters, whether they're Fauves, Cubists, and even Dadaists or Surrealists, it is a reaction against photography, an avant-garde method and an end in its own right.
By disavowing the conventional social meaning (and use) of an object, then, Duchamp "eroticizes" it into a hidden internal object; or, more simply, he obliquely calls attention to the emotional meaning such social meaning typically hides.
Picasso and Duchamp try to maintain perpetual artistic motion through self-contradiction.
For them, fame was not cheap narcissistic satisfaction, but rather mocked and inhabited their creativity. They tried to outdistance their fame, to keep ahead of it by making works that contradicted those that brought them fame.
Fame is a provocative trap and distorting mirror—ironically, like the artist's objects. The artists try to free themselves from it, but also ironically—and sometimes not so ironically—court it.
It is as if Picasso and Duchamp deliberately made a puzzling, distorted art to court and seduce the spectator—to keep them fascinated and engaged as long as possible. The more they had to struggle to understand the art, the more likely the art was to become legendary—the ultimate social success. The difficulty of their art can be understood as a deliberate publicity strategy.
They, not their art, makes the ultimate claim on our attention. Their life and their art seamlessly fuse, which may be the ultimate grandiosity.
Being copied is a sign of being famous, for it indicates that one's art has become an institutional uniform—"universalized"—but Picasso and Duchamp discovered that being contradictory made one all the more famous. Ultimate avant-garde fame comes from being categorized as uncategorizable, that is, utterly individual.
Any masterpiece is called that by the spectator as a last resort.
The genuine artist is not concerned with prestige but with remaining creatively alive.
The audience, determined to maintain the illusion of its unity of being and "wholesomeness," can withdraw from their art or, more subtly, hypermodernize—postmodernize—it, convinced that is is decadent.
therapeutic irony
Until postmodernism, with its masochistic skepticism about art—in postmodernism art is made, but with little or no expectation of any positive human gain from it, and certainly with no conviction in its healing power—the attempt to develop and manifest art's latent potential for healing was inseparable from the idea of "advancing" art.
Postmodernism, coldblooded and calculating about art—Warhol epitomizes this "realistic," objective attitude—pessimistically reduces art to its own history, implicitly acknowledging art's lack of significant effect on human existence and world history.
The sense of decadence is the most emotionally ugly underside of the sense of transcendence, exposed when it is lost.
Warhol's art is like the harsh light a detective shines in the face of a suspected criminal to force a confession from him. Warhol grilled the glamour of the famous, interrogated it until it disintegrated, and showed it to have been a shallow camouflage, a masquerade, all along. The famous disintegrated with it. It was a cosmetic farce, not only because it was skin-deep but because it was applied all too mechanically. Warhol showed the glamour of fame to be a hollow artistic construction: in his hands art became a banal method of glamorizing banal people and things—a tautologization of banality.
Warhol described himself as a machine. His art was in effect a machine for extracting fame from human beings as if it were their soul, compacting them in the process. The concentrated distillate of fame was the product, to be drunk like a rejuvenating elixir by Warhol.
The popularly famous became emotional role models for him. They were narcissistically whole (and as such without—and in no need of—a complicated inner structure) and rewarded with social success for their narcissism and uncomplication. They were more rewarded, certainly, than were esoterically famous avant-garde artists, who still did not realize the futility of wanting to change—reoriginate—life through art, thus changing art in the process. The indifference to reorigination of the popularly famous, and the way life and art seemed seamlessly integrated through their fame, suggested that they had successfully bluffed their way through life and art, reducing both to trivial games, easily played and won.
He was not as accepting as he superficially seemed to be, but rather imposed his indifference on his audience as a way of maintaining a vestigial sense, a semblance, of self. He invented a psuedo-self out of his indifference, in effect denying his anxiety, which was too great and too deep to be healed. His simulated self was a way of living with it, a functional alternative to the self so overwhelmed and crippled by anxiety it no longer seemed real. Warhol's make-believe, theatrical self looked like the believable real thing only to the other celebrity psychotics with whom he surrounded himself. He himself never mistook it for a real self: he knew it was prosthetic self. Warhol's indifference masked his brittleness, but it also got him the audience he needed to exist for himself.
Joseph Beuys: "In places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear."
the avant-garde artist, implicitly and often explicitly critical of his audience, tends to be innovative in medium as well as well as in manner, or else stretches a known medium and manner to their breaking point. They move their art toward radical unreadability, as if that were a position of defiant strength. Their art lacks propriety, which makes it insulting; because of that alienating defect the audience is blind to its point.
Warhol mocked everyman's wish to be ideal, turning it into a bad joke by implying that ideality was nothing more than glamorous illusion, a trick of public appearance. More particularly, ideality was a matter of decorative surface, of the right cosmetics.
Warhol's ironic indifference is like Duchamp's ironic difference
Only in a Germany shaken by the collapse of the fascist ideal of rigid monolithic homogeneity, reifying a simplistic idea of the Germanic, could a radical yet socially committed individualist like Beuys appear. And only in an America confident to the point of mindless arrogance could a socially indifferent and mock individualist like Warhol appear. Only in a Germany in which avant-garde art had been declared degenerate and stifled, and in which creativity had become compliant to ideology, could an avant-garde artist like Beuys emerge, willing to take social and aesthetic risks that were unthinkable even before Hitler. And only in a self-satisfied America could avant-garde art reify itself and become socially conformist, attaching itself to the apron strings of media sensibility, with its determination to present everything with mystifying banality.
Auschwitz demonstrated that rationality could be more insane than irrationality.
For him shamanism was primordial art, and a good part of his purpose was to make art once again primordial, to restore to it the primordial power of healing it once had.
Shamanism, then, was the alternative to authoritarianism. It signaled an altogether different intention: the will to heal rather than to harm. If the essence of creativity is the intention to heal—to repair what has been destroyed and to make reparation for loss—then Beuys's self-conscious attempt to heal through shamanistic creativity was meant to catalyze the creativity of those in need of reconstruction and repair so that they could heal themselves through an inward shamanistic process.
Beuys consciously set himself up as Hitler's opposite in every way. Indeed, his shamanistic uniform mocked the Nazi military uniform, which looked sinister in comparison. His wounded appearance spoke the German historical truth, giving the lie to the fantasy that Hitler could make the Germans primordially whole and strong and unconquerable, restoring them to mythical barbaric greatness.
In a sense, his art was a kind of dialectical materialism, in that certain primordial materials had profound dialectical, or transformative, therapeutic effect for him.
Healing is avant-garde art's last stand.
Being an artist, after all, is more narcissistically satisfying than being a healer, for as an artist one is ultimately answerable only to oneself.
Beuys is the grand climax of a long line of self-contradictory avant-garde narcissists in conflict with a society they want as their audience. Each idealizes themselves while showing society that it is far from ideal, especially compared to themselves. Society celebrates their tragic selfhood and tragic relationship to it in order to deny its own tragedy. With each avant-garde artist it accepts and assimilates, it vindicates and reassures itself. With each avant-garde artist whose isolated suffering it rationalizes, it proclaims its collective solidarity. Ultimately society banalizes the avant-garde artist's narcissistic suffering and conflict with it into a universal ideology of heroic selfhood triumphing over great odds and obstacles. This justifies society's own grandiose belief in itself, for it put the artists in that triumphant position. The avant-garde artist may tantalize society with a sense of its inner tragedy, if at the arm's length of art, but society produces the tragic drama of the avant-garde artist-martyr as proof of its own omnipotence. The real tragedy of the avant-garde artist is that they want to heal a society that has a vested ironic interest in their pathology. Conversely, the tragedy of society is that it does not want to be healed by any means, for it thinks it is fundamentally sound. Art is simply a pawn in this frustrating standoff.
Avant-garde art's oppositionality is a necessary social illusion because it strengthens society's conviction in its own invincibility. Society's assimilation of avant-garde art demonstrates this; it is immune to artistic transgression. The museum is the symbol of society's power to neutralize any artistic threat.
The artist is destroyed for bringing the bad news. They are made into a scapegoat: the tragedy they announce is displaced onto their person and art. The latter become part of a ritual of social sacrifice intended to guarantee the society's survival, even immortality, despite its human failings.
The avant-garde artist is in fact society's tragedy in ideal and harmless public form, allowing society to believe that it is less pathologically tragic than it is. It dismisses its tragic pathology as less dangerous than it is, for this pathology is confined to a few conspicuously pathological individuals, the avant-garde artists.
Beuy's personal tragedy was that he did not understand that his avant-garde performance of Germany's tragedy not only failed to heal it, but unwittingly justified Nazi Germany and its criminal behavior. He should have been more of a clown than he was. [Don't know how he came to claim this, or how being more of a clown would help. Laughing at oneself? Making humor of the Nazis? Of the German mentality during the war? Not sure that would have really helped.]
Tragedy may state the pathology—with special narcissistic vehemence and morbidity in avant-garde tragic art—but comedy alone heals, if healing is possible. Comedy is ultimately more enchanting than tragedy, even for those disenchanted by themselves because of their own tragedy.
Picasso: "I'm just a public entertainer who has understood his time."
From Beuy's point of view, psuedo-avant-garde art threatened to drive out true avant-garde art the way bad money threatens to drive out good money.
Psuedo-avant-garde has dispalced true avant-garde art as the standard bearer of artistic significance. Its values have prevailed. It has militantly declared its falseness as if it were a virtue.
The PAGA is socially entertaining and ingratiating. That is, like kitsch, their art distracts people from the devastating reality and truth of their lives. In using their art to do this, the PAGA is quite unlike the AG "prophet", who attempts to remind people of how far they have strayed from the true path—how far from the True Self they have fallen—and seems to castigate them for it.
PAGA: I'm a worldy king, AG: I'm merely a spiritual savior. The AG was a threat to Rome, but the PAGA is not likely to be a threat, for they reaffirm Rome's values. They are not a critic of it, but rather a propagandist for it.
Warhol's notion of business art affirms America's belief in business above all else, and he was richly rewarded for affirming it. Warhol was never as dadaistically tongue in cheek—as authentically critical—as some of his more intellectual art-world fans thought. They wanted to redeem him for the AG and to rationalize the embarrassing fact that he was always all business, all-American. Indeed, he never quarreled with the cruel reality that in bourgeois society, as Karl Marx said, there is "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'". Warhol seemed to have measured his "personal worth" in the impersonal terms of "exchange value", probably reflected in his indifference and tendency toward depersonalization. He stripped the occupation of artist, "hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe", of its halo, of its last vestige of divine meaning. Nevertheless, he kept the halo, obviously happy that it was made of gold. Warhol, indeed, was the first, or at least the first highly visible, unashamed PAG appropriationist artist.
Bringing the status quo into question has itself become a standard part of the bourgeois status quo, a familiar part of the art and social scene. One has no (art-)worldly status if one is not critical.
It has become increasingly difficult to imagine questions that would truly threaten the bourgeois status quo.
Irony is no longer really critical, or rather it is a comfortable form of criticality, a criticality that causes no self-questioning. It is a criticality without the "agonbite of inwit" to use Jame Joyce's phrase for conscience. Irony has become a form of propriety. It gives no offense. There is no risk in it.
Aesthetic irony, and irony in general, is thus a way of retaining intellectual honor in the face of emotional futility. It masks the depression that comes with the recognition that it is impossible to change the world significantly with a pose of profound insight into it.
In general, disillusionment is at the core of irony.
Robert Morris?
"I am a transmitter, I radiate out," says Beuys, that is, he works for others as well as himself.
Beuys did not want to make a beautiful appearance, but rather an energetic one. He wanted the energy he radiated to transform his audience substantially.
Beuys wanted to shock the audience for its own emotional and existential good while the dadaists did so in order to mock the audience's feelings and existence, to trip it of its raison d'etre or to show it its nothingness.
Duchamp's silence was a shrewd irony at the expense of art, a debunking strategy that was ultimately, for Beuys, an empty gesture. It showed cold contempt rather than warm feeling for the audience.
Duchamp, the dadaists, and Morris were false Egyptian magicians, faking their art. They made a farce of the very idea of art, especially as an attempt to emotionally and existentially help others, while Beuys privileged himself and Bergman as authentic artists, making art that was not only innovative but helpful.
The PAGA has only to look like an AGA, but their pursuit of fame and fortune shows society that they are really just like everybody else. The deeper point is that the PAGA wants to save society's face, and in so doing, save art's face. Their art's fame and fortune make it a cultic commodity, and as such truly magical. [By giving the consumer this horatio alger story of anyone and everyone can make art and strike it big, and be rich, famous, and 'meaningful' ie 'culturally relevant' it is socially successful.]
Gauguin: "In art, thre are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiaritsts. And, in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the state takes it over?"
Society finds it easier to deal with manufactured rather than spontaneous revolt.
AG shamelessness is neutralized by PAGA heartlessness.
The avant-garde artist is conceived as a kind of Promethean adventurer, an individualist and risk taker in a sheepish society, an Overman bringing to the more timid world of the herdman, to use Nietzsche's distinction, a new kind of fire, burning away blinding darkness and affording new insight as well as sight, a new vision of what art as well as life can be—a comprehensive new enlightenment.
Not only has the artist been sharply differentiated from and elevated above others, but those others, but those others have been regarded as too ordinary to comprehend how extraordinary it is to be an artist—although they are obliged to be their audience, in homage to their creativity, if not necessarily to the particulars of their production. They are obliged to give them fame simply for their being, even if they can make no sense of it.
This book is about the simultaneity of this respect and doubt: it is about the new ambivalence about the artist—in contrast to the old ambivalence, in which their deviance and outsiderness were unconsciously admired and envied even as they were consciously deplored. Today, the artist remains an unconventional hero, but he is also perceived as a pretender—all too stylized and privileged in his unconventionality—if not quite a conventional fraud.
If art for art's sake implies narcissism, it is secondary or defensive narcissism, rather than the consummate, cynical, self-celebratory narcissism of neo-avant-garde art.
Art for art's sake is art's final defense against the threat posed to it by modern science and technology, which seems to deprive it of any realistic function, even of any reason for being. Art for art's sake asserts that art may no longer be the most adequate expression of external reality, but that it is still the best expression of internal reality.
Fear of decadence and the wish for rejuvenation haunt—indeed, terrorize—modern thinking about art. Nietzsche's conception of art as the only means of transmuting values—of rescuing life from decadence by rejuvenating it—epitomizes this dialectic of decadence.
"A painting being auctioned off for 50 million has more impact on how art is perceived and understood today than the actual art...produced."
For the neo-avant-garde artist, the artist has an inherent right to fame simply by reason of being an artist, which is transparently narcissistic assumption. They begin their career as a self-styled overman, presupposing that the artist is the primordial creator—a misconception ironically created in the first place by the avant-garde artist.
Fame, we might say, is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure.
Duchamp: "The artist's attitude counts more than their art."
Picasso: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon."
Distorting is a characteristic of the 20th century, and with all the painters, whether they're Fauves, Cubists, and even Dadaists or Surrealists, it is a reaction against photography, an avant-garde method and an end in its own right.
By disavowing the conventional social meaning (and use) of an object, then, Duchamp "eroticizes" it into a hidden internal object; or, more simply, he obliquely calls attention to the emotional meaning such social meaning typically hides.
Picasso and Duchamp try to maintain perpetual artistic motion through self-contradiction.
For them, fame was not cheap narcissistic satisfaction, but rather mocked and inhabited their creativity. They tried to outdistance their fame, to keep ahead of it by making works that contradicted those that brought them fame.
Fame is a provocative trap and distorting mirror—ironically, like the artist's objects. The artists try to free themselves from it, but also ironically—and sometimes not so ironically—court it.
It is as if Picasso and Duchamp deliberately made a puzzling, distorted art to court and seduce the spectator—to keep them fascinated and engaged as long as possible. The more they had to struggle to understand the art, the more likely the art was to become legendary—the ultimate social success. The difficulty of their art can be understood as a deliberate publicity strategy.
They, not their art, makes the ultimate claim on our attention. Their life and their art seamlessly fuse, which may be the ultimate grandiosity.
Being copied is a sign of being famous, for it indicates that one's art has become an institutional uniform—"universalized"—but Picasso and Duchamp discovered that being contradictory made one all the more famous. Ultimate avant-garde fame comes from being categorized as uncategorizable, that is, utterly individual.
Any masterpiece is called that by the spectator as a last resort.
The genuine artist is not concerned with prestige but with remaining creatively alive.
The audience, determined to maintain the illusion of its unity of being and "wholesomeness," can withdraw from their art or, more subtly, hypermodernize—postmodernize—it, convinced that is is decadent.
therapeutic irony
Until postmodernism, with its masochistic skepticism about art—in postmodernism art is made, but with little or no expectation of any positive human gain from it, and certainly with no conviction in its healing power—the attempt to develop and manifest art's latent potential for healing was inseparable from the idea of "advancing" art.
Postmodernism, coldblooded and calculating about art—Warhol epitomizes this "realistic," objective attitude—pessimistically reduces art to its own history, implicitly acknowledging art's lack of significant effect on human existence and world history.
The sense of decadence is the most emotionally ugly underside of the sense of transcendence, exposed when it is lost.
Warhol's art is like the harsh light a detective shines in the face of a suspected criminal to force a confession from him. Warhol grilled the glamour of the famous, interrogated it until it disintegrated, and showed it to have been a shallow camouflage, a masquerade, all along. The famous disintegrated with it. It was a cosmetic farce, not only because it was skin-deep but because it was applied all too mechanically. Warhol showed the glamour of fame to be a hollow artistic construction: in his hands art became a banal method of glamorizing banal people and things—a tautologization of banality.
Warhol described himself as a machine. His art was in effect a machine for extracting fame from human beings as if it were their soul, compacting them in the process. The concentrated distillate of fame was the product, to be drunk like a rejuvenating elixir by Warhol.
The popularly famous became emotional role models for him. They were narcissistically whole (and as such without—and in no need of—a complicated inner structure) and rewarded with social success for their narcissism and uncomplication. They were more rewarded, certainly, than were esoterically famous avant-garde artists, who still did not realize the futility of wanting to change—reoriginate—life through art, thus changing art in the process. The indifference to reorigination of the popularly famous, and the way life and art seemed seamlessly integrated through their fame, suggested that they had successfully bluffed their way through life and art, reducing both to trivial games, easily played and won.
He was not as accepting as he superficially seemed to be, but rather imposed his indifference on his audience as a way of maintaining a vestigial sense, a semblance, of self. He invented a psuedo-self out of his indifference, in effect denying his anxiety, which was too great and too deep to be healed. His simulated self was a way of living with it, a functional alternative to the self so overwhelmed and crippled by anxiety it no longer seemed real. Warhol's make-believe, theatrical self looked like the believable real thing only to the other celebrity psychotics with whom he surrounded himself. He himself never mistook it for a real self: he knew it was prosthetic self. Warhol's indifference masked his brittleness, but it also got him the audience he needed to exist for himself.
Joseph Beuys: "In places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear."
the avant-garde artist, implicitly and often explicitly critical of his audience, tends to be innovative in medium as well as well as in manner, or else stretches a known medium and manner to their breaking point. They move their art toward radical unreadability, as if that were a position of defiant strength. Their art lacks propriety, which makes it insulting; because of that alienating defect the audience is blind to its point.
Warhol mocked everyman's wish to be ideal, turning it into a bad joke by implying that ideality was nothing more than glamorous illusion, a trick of public appearance. More particularly, ideality was a matter of decorative surface, of the right cosmetics.
Warhol's ironic indifference is like Duchamp's ironic difference
Only in a Germany shaken by the collapse of the fascist ideal of rigid monolithic homogeneity, reifying a simplistic idea of the Germanic, could a radical yet socially committed individualist like Beuys appear. And only in an America confident to the point of mindless arrogance could a socially indifferent and mock individualist like Warhol appear. Only in a Germany in which avant-garde art had been declared degenerate and stifled, and in which creativity had become compliant to ideology, could an avant-garde artist like Beuys emerge, willing to take social and aesthetic risks that were unthinkable even before Hitler. And only in a self-satisfied America could avant-garde art reify itself and become socially conformist, attaching itself to the apron strings of media sensibility, with its determination to present everything with mystifying banality.
Auschwitz demonstrated that rationality could be more insane than irrationality.
For him shamanism was primordial art, and a good part of his purpose was to make art once again primordial, to restore to it the primordial power of healing it once had.
Shamanism, then, was the alternative to authoritarianism. It signaled an altogether different intention: the will to heal rather than to harm. If the essence of creativity is the intention to heal—to repair what has been destroyed and to make reparation for loss—then Beuys's self-conscious attempt to heal through shamanistic creativity was meant to catalyze the creativity of those in need of reconstruction and repair so that they could heal themselves through an inward shamanistic process.
Beuys consciously set himself up as Hitler's opposite in every way. Indeed, his shamanistic uniform mocked the Nazi military uniform, which looked sinister in comparison. His wounded appearance spoke the German historical truth, giving the lie to the fantasy that Hitler could make the Germans primordially whole and strong and unconquerable, restoring them to mythical barbaric greatness.
In a sense, his art was a kind of dialectical materialism, in that certain primordial materials had profound dialectical, or transformative, therapeutic effect for him.
Healing is avant-garde art's last stand.
Being an artist, after all, is more narcissistically satisfying than being a healer, for as an artist one is ultimately answerable only to oneself.
Beuys is the grand climax of a long line of self-contradictory avant-garde narcissists in conflict with a society they want as their audience. Each idealizes themselves while showing society that it is far from ideal, especially compared to themselves. Society celebrates their tragic selfhood and tragic relationship to it in order to deny its own tragedy. With each avant-garde artist it accepts and assimilates, it vindicates and reassures itself. With each avant-garde artist whose isolated suffering it rationalizes, it proclaims its collective solidarity. Ultimately society banalizes the avant-garde artist's narcissistic suffering and conflict with it into a universal ideology of heroic selfhood triumphing over great odds and obstacles. This justifies society's own grandiose belief in itself, for it put the artists in that triumphant position. The avant-garde artist may tantalize society with a sense of its inner tragedy, if at the arm's length of art, but society produces the tragic drama of the avant-garde artist-martyr as proof of its own omnipotence. The real tragedy of the avant-garde artist is that they want to heal a society that has a vested ironic interest in their pathology. Conversely, the tragedy of society is that it does not want to be healed by any means, for it thinks it is fundamentally sound. Art is simply a pawn in this frustrating standoff.
Avant-garde art's oppositionality is a necessary social illusion because it strengthens society's conviction in its own invincibility. Society's assimilation of avant-garde art demonstrates this; it is immune to artistic transgression. The museum is the symbol of society's power to neutralize any artistic threat.
The artist is destroyed for bringing the bad news. They are made into a scapegoat: the tragedy they announce is displaced onto their person and art. The latter become part of a ritual of social sacrifice intended to guarantee the society's survival, even immortality, despite its human failings.
The avant-garde artist is in fact society's tragedy in ideal and harmless public form, allowing society to believe that it is less pathologically tragic than it is. It dismisses its tragic pathology as less dangerous than it is, for this pathology is confined to a few conspicuously pathological individuals, the avant-garde artists.
Beuy's personal tragedy was that he did not understand that his avant-garde performance of Germany's tragedy not only failed to heal it, but unwittingly justified Nazi Germany and its criminal behavior. He should have been more of a clown than he was. [Don't know how he came to claim this, or how being more of a clown would help. Laughing at oneself? Making humor of the Nazis? Of the German mentality during the war? Not sure that would have really helped.]
Tragedy may state the pathology—with special narcissistic vehemence and morbidity in avant-garde tragic art—but comedy alone heals, if healing is possible. Comedy is ultimately more enchanting than tragedy, even for those disenchanted by themselves because of their own tragedy.
Picasso: "I'm just a public entertainer who has understood his time."
From Beuy's point of view, psuedo-avant-garde art threatened to drive out true avant-garde art the way bad money threatens to drive out good money.
Psuedo-avant-garde has dispalced true avant-garde art as the standard bearer of artistic significance. Its values have prevailed. It has militantly declared its falseness as if it were a virtue.
The PAGA is socially entertaining and ingratiating. That is, like kitsch, their art distracts people from the devastating reality and truth of their lives. In using their art to do this, the PAGA is quite unlike the AG "prophet", who attempts to remind people of how far they have strayed from the true path—how far from the True Self they have fallen—and seems to castigate them for it.
PAGA: I'm a worldy king, AG: I'm merely a spiritual savior. The AG was a threat to Rome, but the PAGA is not likely to be a threat, for they reaffirm Rome's values. They are not a critic of it, but rather a propagandist for it.
Warhol's notion of business art affirms America's belief in business above all else, and he was richly rewarded for affirming it. Warhol was never as dadaistically tongue in cheek—as authentically critical—as some of his more intellectual art-world fans thought. They wanted to redeem him for the AG and to rationalize the embarrassing fact that he was always all business, all-American. Indeed, he never quarreled with the cruel reality that in bourgeois society, as Karl Marx said, there is "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'". Warhol seemed to have measured his "personal worth" in the impersonal terms of "exchange value", probably reflected in his indifference and tendency toward depersonalization. He stripped the occupation of artist, "hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe", of its halo, of its last vestige of divine meaning. Nevertheless, he kept the halo, obviously happy that it was made of gold. Warhol, indeed, was the first, or at least the first highly visible, unashamed PAG appropriationist artist.
Bringing the status quo into question has itself become a standard part of the bourgeois status quo, a familiar part of the art and social scene. One has no (art-)worldly status if one is not critical.
It has become increasingly difficult to imagine questions that would truly threaten the bourgeois status quo.
Irony is no longer really critical, or rather it is a comfortable form of criticality, a criticality that causes no self-questioning. It is a criticality without the "agonbite of inwit" to use Jame Joyce's phrase for conscience. Irony has become a form of propriety. It gives no offense. There is no risk in it.
Aesthetic irony, and irony in general, is thus a way of retaining intellectual honor in the face of emotional futility. It masks the depression that comes with the recognition that it is impossible to change the world significantly with a pose of profound insight into it.
In general, disillusionment is at the core of irony.
Robert Morris?
"I am a transmitter, I radiate out," says Beuys, that is, he works for others as well as himself.
Beuys did not want to make a beautiful appearance, but rather an energetic one. He wanted the energy he radiated to transform his audience substantially.
Beuys wanted to shock the audience for its own emotional and existential good while the dadaists did so in order to mock the audience's feelings and existence, to trip it of its raison d'etre or to show it its nothingness.
Duchamp's silence was a shrewd irony at the expense of art, a debunking strategy that was ultimately, for Beuys, an empty gesture. It showed cold contempt rather than warm feeling for the audience.
Duchamp, the dadaists, and Morris were false Egyptian magicians, faking their art. They made a farce of the very idea of art, especially as an attempt to emotionally and existentially help others, while Beuys privileged himself and Bergman as authentic artists, making art that was not only innovative but helpful.
The PAGA has only to look like an AGA, but their pursuit of fame and fortune shows society that they are really just like everybody else. The deeper point is that the PAGA wants to save society's face, and in so doing, save art's face. Their art's fame and fortune make it a cultic commodity, and as such truly magical. [By giving the consumer this horatio alger story of anyone and everyone can make art and strike it big, and be rich, famous, and 'meaningful' ie 'culturally relevant' it is socially successful.]
Gauguin: "In art, thre are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiaritsts. And, in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the state takes it over?"
Society finds it easier to deal with manufactured rather than spontaneous revolt.
AG shamelessness is neutralized by PAGA heartlessness.
August 18, 2015
A good read. Interesting subject.
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