The End of Art? Before and After — an Introduction

The End of Art? Before and After — An Introduction This course is called “The End of Art”. It’s both a journey and a story that begins with the visual and artis- tic culture of New York in the late 1950s. To get a sense for what it was like, imagine arriving in New York for the first time in 1957 to research and write a book about modern art. What you would discover in the studios, galleries, bars, night clubs, and museums of New York would be a complex and fascinating world on the cusp of a dramatic and historic change. It was a pivotal moment, as you’ll see in the next several weeks, and the last time in recent history that we had what you might call a relatively stable and homogeneous art world. There were several factors that gave the impression of stability. The 1950s in the U.S. was a time of post-war prosperity and eco- nomic growth, which brought greater support for the arts from institu- tions, patrons, and collectors. And “downtown” in Greenwich Village in particular, there was an extraordinarily vibrant and creative mix of painters, writers, composers, musicians, photographers, dancers, and experimental filmmakers. Abstract Expressionism—celebrated in the image of Jackson Pollock (aka ”Jack the Dripper”)—was in its heroic phase and a dominant force in the art scene. Every artist had to confront it and contend with it. You didn’t have to be an abstract expressionist painter like Pollock, Krasner, Willem de Kooning, or Rothko, but you did have to measure yourself against them. The “AbEx” painters set the standard and art- Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950 ists were forced to take a stand in response to it. The artists’ studios and their small, cooperative galleries on Tenth Street, where you were likely to run into Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, the art historian Meyer Schapiro, and critic Harold Rosen- berg, were just a few short blocks away from the Cedar Tavern on University Place and Eighth, where gossip and debate about art was regular evening entertainment. Painters Grace Hartigan and Larry Riv- ers, the poet Frank O’Hara, and many of the young artists were also fond of The Five Spot, a small and very spare bar near Cooper Square, where Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and Cecil Taylor played. De Kooning, Hartigan, Al Leslie, Rivers, and David Smith were often there—and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Leroi Jones, and of course Frank O’Hara. But above all, this was the place where, for the first time, you would have heard John Coltrane, a young jazz saxo- phonist from Philadelphia, playing with Theloni- ous Monk. It was an important time for both musicians. Coltrane, struggling with drug and alcohol addiction, had been fired by Miles Davis in the spring, entered a rehabilitation program and was finally “clean” and getting back on his feet. Monk was recovering from his own set- backs and isolation. A victim of discrimination Don Schlitten, Monk & Coltrane at the Five Spot, 1957 and an aggressive police crackdown on drugs in the early ‘50s, Monk and pianist Bud Powell were pulled over one evening in 1951 and their car searched by police, who found a small quantity of heroin. Monk—not himself a drug user—was arrested and jailed for 60 days, refusing to let his friend take the rap alone. When released, Monk’s “cabaret card”—a musician’s permit to perform in New York City nightclubs where alcohol was served—was revoked. It took six years and the intervention of white jazz critics, the ACLU, and his friend and patron, Baroness Pannonica de Königswarter, to convince the police department, based on medical evidence, that Monk was not a junkie. In 1957, six years after he and Powell were arrested, Monk’s cabaret card was re-instated and he re-emerged to great acclaim with a six month gig at the Five Spot. A few blocks south of the Five Spot, on the Bowery, painter Al Leslie and photographer Robert Frank were experimenting with new forms of documentary and narrative film. Jack Kerouac, who published his novel On the Road in 1957, was also around and met Robert Frank, who asked him to write the introduction for his forthcoming book of photographs, The Americans, a work that would exert a powerful influence on the develop- ment of documentary photography in the 20th century. 1957 was also the year Norman Mailer’s controversial essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” appeared in Dissent maga- zine, and the year the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to French existentialist writer Albert Camus, whose work, along with that of Jean- Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, had a profound effect on the thinking of artists and left intellectuals in the U.S. These are just a few examples of what was going on in the Village at the time. Arriving in the midst of this scene, you could not have imagined how much things would change in just a few years. There was already a shift in emphasis by artists who departed significantly from the tragic sensibil- ity of abstract expressionism. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were young downtown painters with a more detached, ironic, and cool approach to their work. John Cage, their friend and a mentor for many artists and musicians, was a com- poser working with prepared piano and chance operations—drawing inspiration more from eastern relig- ious traditions than from the French existential philosophers. Cage was also teaching courses in experimental composition at The New School, influencing a new generation of visual and performing artists, including Allan Kaprow. And his partner, Merce Cunningham, was collaborating with Robert Rauschen- berg, pushing the limits of modern dance. And then, of course, there was Andy Warhol, who in 1964 would ex- hibit his Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery—an act so de-stabilizing to the heroic stance of Abstract Expressionism that the philosopher Ar- thur Danto, in a subsequent epiphany, declared it “the end of art”. From then on, Danto claimed, anything could be a work of art. Thus, with the emergence of Warhol, the grand narrative of art as it was known it for centuries in the West came to an end. For our story, the so-called death of art comes not at the end but rather at the midterm. It’s then that we turn our attention to contemporary art and formulate our own response to Danto’s thesis. When you consider the number and variety of artists, artworks, styles, mediums, and subject matter today, it seems that Danto may be on the right track. From the artist’s perspective, there certainly appears to be total freedom to do as you please. As Danto says, in today’s international artworld, “anything goes”. But that, in itself, raises serious questions. If we understand “anything Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1964 goes” to mean you can do as you please, then how does an artist determine what to do? If there is no standard for what makes something a work of art, no constraints on what is accepted as art, no commitment to “art that matters”, how does one proceed as an artist, specta- tor, historian, curator, or critic? How do you decide what’s worth doing, what’s worth showing, what’s worth looking at if there are absolutely no guidelines at all—if “anything goes”? One obvious response, of course, is to say that you should do what you like and take full advantage of the freedom. But if all we ever end up doing, saying, thinking, or looking at is “what we like”, haven’t we 2 given up on the notion that there’s something at stake in art—that “art matters”? Doesn’t the work of art in such a world become just another disposable commodity, subject to one’s personal taste, momentary preference, and nothing more? This would reflect a very unusual concept of art indeed, and one at odds with the relation people have had to art in almost every culture on earth. So that’s the dilemma we face in the second half of our course. How are we to think about art today? What role does it play in our lives? What concerns and interests does it express? What feelings does it embody? In what sense does it matter to us? I claim that there’s a lot at stake in this encounter with “the end of art”. If we can’t even imagine how art could shape our experience, express our deepest feelings, show us what it’s like to be the beings we are today, then there’s little hope it will. And if we accept uncritically the belief that in art “anything goes”, we miss the opportunity to think seriously about it, what it might mean, what we can learn from it, and how it can inform our experience as human beings who share a world and responsibility for it. These are some of the things art has done in the past. Is it possible for art to do that today and in the fu- ture? Or have we truly reached “the end of art” in a sense more radical than even Danto imagines? That’s the rationale and the plan for the course. Our general goal is also to question the concept of art and the way art is bought, sold, and institutionalized on a global scale. The approach I take in this course is based on the assumption that examining and questioning contemporary thinking about art is the first step toward understanding and, perhaps, changing it.

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