My distinction was less of one, more of the other. I did not say, either- or.
Greenberg argued for extreme subjectivity in painting by insisting that it should restrict itself to the most essential materials of painting: color on/in a flat surface. That led to post-painterly abstraction and color field painting . They became extinct movements after a few years. One can see a small but revealing retro show of this work now at the Museum of American Art in D.C. There's another kind of subjectivity in art, one that points away from the Greenbergian formalism (materials) to the issue of expressing selfness in a world that must expunge it in favor of mass culture and global economics. Donald Kuspit says that the longest lasting mode of modernism is expressionism in its many forms throughout the 20C. In this the artists must struggle with the spiritual (the inner necessity Kandinsky wrote of, which is the urge for self-identity) against the overwhelming ability of "life" as processed by cultural media and imagery, to subsume it. This, as you realize, has little to do with splashing paint but can include that, as with Abstract Expressionism. Some recent painting (even the act of painting is an affirmation of selfness moreso than other appropriation type media), especially that which reveals the struggle I mention, as for instance, abstraction that embodies an animate metaphor. Your reference to Slam Poetry is fine with me. I can take it as evidence of the same effort that is the center of art crises today (although the format favors banality -- as one who remembers the coffee house " Beatnik" readings of 40 plus years ago). Your reference to kitten paintings and the like as obvious unart doesn't fly anymore. Jeff Koons and thousands of others have conflated the ordinary and common vulgarity (the mainstay substance of democratic culture) with high art long ago and continue to reap the $$$$ and love of the culture. They are the most representative exemplars of democratic values and the thoroughly blended art AS life paradigm. Fifty years ago the cultural emphasis was on spreading the values of high art throughout the democratic mileau. It worked to a large extent. For instance, look at advertising campaigns of the 50s, like the ads for the Container Corp. of America, and see how the ideals of high art and culture were employed to spread a notion of enlightened Americanism. The Great Books fashion was another example, to say nothing of the huge increase in college enrollments. Now it is the reverse, replacing the values of high art with the banal values of commonplace democratic culture. Today an ad campaign like that of the Container Corp. would be seen as ludicrous. And who reads the Great Books? Not even the middlebrow craze for encyclopedias has a life anymore. Nowadays it's the peoples' enclyclopedia, Wickipedia (sp. ?) a free-for-all mostly unvetted dictionary of gossip and wild opinions,m that stands for knowledge. I'm all for daily life and its varied iterations. Yet I favor a filtering of that into spiritual values to aid the identity of self. When the self is merely a composite of the commonplace everyday imagery and values, something essential is lost. Art aims to recover that something because it is the genuine bond among people. It is difficult and uncertain struggle. It is our reality. When art has become identical with life (the material imagery and its fictions) then there is no art and there is no self-identity, I mean no human identity. Aesthetics, whatever that is, and I suppose it means siomething like stand-alone art quality has been exposed has nothing more than the surplus value of commodity exchange, and it can't be measured except by voluntary added cash value. Thus the auctions. Money becomes the measure of aesthetic quality. Any smart schoolkid can tell you that money cannot measure the ineffable but somehow our culture has convinced itself that it's the closest and therefore the only sure way to do it. Never mind the fact that most folks don't even get a leg itch from Koons or Warhol (well, maybe Warhol because he's more transparently banal than even Koons). The thrill in looking at their work is being in the presence of multi-millions of dollars, exactly the same as going to Barney's and looking at $10,000 suits or handbags. In long gone days of yore,m when aesthetics was a troubling and barely legitimate term looking for survival, it was clearly understood to be about spiritual stuff, the inner self, the troubled soul conflicted with competing desires and emotions and finding a way to symbolize that in humanizing form. Thus taste. Taste was more than today's vulgarized preference for one symbol of cultural vanity over another. It was about some form that could both shape the inner self and also make it public, disinterested; that is, something shared as evidence of being human beyond the imagery of daily life. Warhol is important, not as an artist, but as he wanted, a symbol and actor who exemplified the supremacy of commerce, the totalizing absorption of humanity by material exchange, the fullest representative of how democracy fails to preserve the individual even as it declares indivdual freedom as its most precious ideal. It replaces the individual with an icon, a commerce shaped caricature that equates spiritual value with unlimited consumerism. I don't have grudges against Warhol and his followers, busied as they are in the downward spiral of irony -- (it always leads to dispair). They are not in my field, not in the field of art. They are in the frenzied midst of commerce, in the center of (global) capitalist democracy. They are its avatars. As always in modernism, artists are on the fringe, outside, at the margin. They are rebels. Revolutionaries. They symbolize and expose what damages or exhilerates the human spirit and personal freedom, bluntly and directly, not through puns and smirky irony that ultimately plays up the cynics. And they don't know how to do their job. They struggle and test because they must recover a lost, alienated and deprived selfness and create its symbols anew. For most, perhaps even the artists, those symbols appear meaningless because they allude to what life excludes. When the cultural theorists go to work on these symbols they dissect them to the tiniest and most obscure bits but sometimes there is a remainder, something persistent, meaningless but crucial. WC
