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“On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 PART Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 PART 1 FEMALE 1 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the sixth in our series of lectures on the general subject of the future of art. Today’s speaker is Michael Fried. He’s assistant professor in fine arts at Harvard University. He studied at Princeton and graduated in 1959, and he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Mr. Fried is a regular contributor to Artforum, and he is the author of a forthcoming book on the artist Morris Louis, which is to published in the fall of next year. Mr. Fried also organizes exhibitions, and he has recently arranged a very successful showing of the work of Anthony Caro in London. Mr. Fried. (applause) MICHAEL FRIED [00:01:00] Very little of the successes of Caro’s exhibition is due to me. I wish I had been able to come here for that (inaudible) sculptures. Very beautiful. The most beautiful sculpture since the work of Smith. But I hope that there will be a chance for a large Caro exhibition to be done in America sometime in the reasonable future. Now, let me preface my beginning with a kind of apology. I had hoped to have this in better shape. I had left a certain amount of time to work on it towards the end. And within the last week, of course, the [00:02:00] situation at Harvard has blown up, chiefly because the administration called in the police for a police bust on the students who occupied University Hall before there was any time to arrive at any kind of reasonable judgment about what should be done to those students or with those students. So everyone on the faculty has been meeting more or less day and night, trying to keep the situation from getting completely out of hand, which it really is already out of hand. I don’t know what you read about it in the newspapers here. It’s hard to get an accurate idea of it. I noticed the New York Times yesterday reported, with kind of characteristic blandness, that the faculty voted — or passed a resolution disapproving both of the students for occupying University Hall, and disapproving of the university [00:03:00] for calling in the police. That’s, of course, absurd. The students are part of the university. So are the faculty. And the faculty passed a resolution disapproving of the administration for calling in the police. Well, that’s by way of apology. I’ll actually begin by making a few general remarks. The overall subject of this series of lectures is the future of art. I don’t know whether or not previous lectures have spoken to this subject. But relatively little of what I have to say this afternoon can be described as predictions about, or even as hopes for, the future. Mostly I’ll be talking about what I take to be the present state of the art, and in particular painting and sculpture, and about what I regard as some of the most important developments in the art of the immediate or the recent past. And if there were time, I’m sure I’d find myself talking about the art of a more distant past [00:04:00] as well. But I don’t say this by way of apology. In the first place, the question “What’s the future of art?” cannot be separated from the question “What is the present state of the art?” and that means the present state of the individual art. In general, any beliefs or intimations about the future, about where we’re heading in art or anything Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 23 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 else, presumes one or another view or understanding of where we are now, of the nature of the meaning of the present. And on that score, the nature of the meaning of the present state of the visual arts, painting and sculpture, as any reader of art magazines today is well-aware, there’s very little agreement, certainly nothing remotely like general accord or universal consensus. On the contrary, there’s a more or less constant, more or less heated, clash of divergent and often mutually exclusive views, value judgments, interpretations, critical programs, canons of important works and artists; [00:05:00] for that matter, canons of important critics. In other words, there’s just about no real agreement about the nature of the present, about the meaning of contemporary art. Now, in a way, that’s healthy, I think, because it at least forces us to realize that not just the future, but also the present, is problematic. What I mean is that the controversy keeps us from lapsing too easily into the assumption that the present, at least, is clear, because it’s what we are living, what we can verify with our senses, because it’s present to us. Whereas, the assumption might go, the past is remote, dead, irrecoverable, and the future not yet born, not yet here. The truth is, or at least truth as I see it, is that the present is at least as hard to make out as the past, and can be even harder, because we have no [00:06:00] further perspective to view it from. We don’t have a kind of present that’s in any way secure to view the past from. Moreover, we have no body of events or work whose importance has emerged as unquestionable against which we can see it. Now, the task of making out the meaning of the present belongs to criticism — in this case, art criticism — and it’s one of the justifications for the activity of the critic. The present doesn’t bear its meaning on its sleeve. That meaning involves making value judgments, comparisons with the past, interpretations, analyses, putting forward arguments, and all that is the province of criticism. Anyway, there are different views of the present. One might even say, that throughout the history of modern art, and with a new explicitness in recent years, [00:07:00] there has been a struggle for the present. That means a number of things. Perhaps most obviously, it means a struggle for certain rewards, commissions, big shows in museums, so on and so forth. But it’s also a struggle, waged both by artists and critics, for the right to speak for the present, to express its needs, its imperatives, its values, its priorities, and its aspirations. Finally, nothing less than this, nothing less than this right, this prerogative, to speak for the present is at stake in critical disagreements and controversies. That’s one reason, I think, that those controversies can be as heated, and often as ugly, as they are. Traditionally, which, in this case, means since the mid-19th century, the critical struggle for the present has tended to take [00:08:00] place between men who champion different artists, different schools of painting, different movements. In other words, disagreements looked as though they amounted to or entail taking sides, backing one artist or one group of artists against another, or against whatever one took to be the academy at that time, against other critics. Of course, this sort of controversy hasn’t disappeared, not by a long shot. One has only to think of the kind of controversy that Pop art engendered a few years ago. But in recent years, we’ve seen more and more of other kinds of controversies, in particular those instances where two or more critics claim to admire the same artist, but disagree radically as to the meaning of their art. It turns out that these disagreements are at least as violent as the others. At first, that may seem surprising, [00:09:00] since the critics involved seem to agree on so much. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 23 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 But then it turns out that, really, it isn’t surprising, and they agree on very little. One might say they agree on the names of the important artists, but on very little else. They don’t agree, for example, about what those artists are doing, what painting and sculpture mean to those artists, and in fact they don’t agree about what the nature of painting and sculpture at a given moment — simply what the meaning of both is. This, suddenly, no longer seems to be simply a disagreement of different tastes, but something more basic, more fundamental. You might say that this disagreement is inseparable from the other disagreement, when you argue about [00:10:00] different painters, but it’s kind of doubly acrimonious, since it lays bare the fact that what’s being challenges, what’s at stake, is precisely one’s right to speak for the art that one admires, or the art that one claims to admire. In fact, what’s finally at stake is nothing less than one’s claim to admire that art itself. What’s being challenged in a disagreement like that is one’s claim to conviction about the art that one is claiming to be convinced by.
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