Missing: role of CIA using a budget of 200M (billions in today money) to promote abstract art as rival to nasty commie realism (prone to you know, protest things). No conspiracy theory: check stubs, correspondence, all now in public record. See Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (2000). Those “critics” you reference weren’t “trying to understand” the art, they were paid to make a narrative to fool the public.
Sweet piece. It gave me a lot to think about. So as usual, I'll probably leave a very long comment. XD
While the role of art in the Cold War was a thing, two things can be true at the same time. And I can see this reaction to modernity being one of them. On the whole, however, I think the fear was less justified than it may have been at the time. In terms of the literature/motion picture struggle, how often do we hear that an adaptation is never as good as the book, even if there are more good adaptations than we'd like to believe? Sure we'll watch that adaptation, but we've never been fully convinced of film's triumph over literature and it's not just readers who say that. I think it's the same with visual arts vs. photography: where are you more likely to go in Paris, the Louvre or a photo gallery? Even those who are passionate about photography will probably go to both.
As for visual art, the reason people weren't convinced by, say, the red square was quite simple: a red square is just a red square, nothing more. So people feel like contemporary art is a scam, and I don't disagree. It may well be that visual art is at a loss of where to go: for those who think that, I think they should peruse the paintings of the late Zdzislaw Beksinski who, apart from the naive painters, gives the best sense of direction of where to go from here. (Though that's just my opinion)
But be it painting or literature, I don't believe the tech arts are as much of a threat to the traditional arts as we think. After all, how did Oprah and Jeff Bezos become some of the richest people on the planet? Through books. Who became richer than the Queen? J.K. Rowling. And no matter how many contemporary books are written, no matter how much the classic writers are demonized as "old white men," the fact of the matter is: we're still drawn to the classics more than anything postmodern. If anything, people are sick of the postmodernists even if they can't fully ditch Pynchon (and sometimes DeLillo). Whereas Oprah's and Bezos' net work comes in large part from the populace's future anticipation of writing that's at least as good as the classics. We're still more likely to want to visit the Louvre or the Musee d'Orsay or the Uffizi in Florence than the Guggenheim. Hell, travelers to Europe are a lot more likely to want to visit the great cathedrals even if they are hardcore atheists than, say, the Bauhaus or the brutalist postwar relics. Beauty and quality matter, as do spirituality. (Which is also another thing the arts back then possessed that we do not)
But if that realization is alien to us, I think it's been for the simple fact that from the 1920s until recently, we've been living in the glory days of film. It's not just that the film medium was ascendant: film could deliver. From Buster Keaton to very recently we've been inundated with a lot of very good films, including cult movies with curious philosophical premises and even blockbusters have had food for thought. (like the X-Men movies) Just as the Middle Ages were the glory days of cathedrals and the Renaissance the glory days of painting in Florence. Different eras have different strengths in the arts. But now, Hollywood has become a parody of its former self, churning out remakes and sequels with only profits in mind and not art. Even those movies from the 2010s that are good are seldom, if ever, original, and though I can't comment much on that I suspect there won't be much to cherish from this huge Netflix boom, justified solely by the weak argument that quantity can trump quality as a metric of measuring cultural strength, even as our greater understanding of the Middle Ages lays that corpse to rest.
The same with photography. The great photographers were great because film photography produced so few pictures it needed a human vision to guide it so as to seek out that perfect photogenic moment. Now it is the most oversaturated art form in the world, more than literature. And when you can snap your camera a gajillion times and just choose the best one out of the bunch, there's nothing artistic about that. I appreciate fruit pickers as much as the next guy, but nobody has ever argued that fruit picking is an art. And they haven't made that argument for a good reason: they know it's not an argument they can win.
In other words: now that the late 20th-century mediums of art are in the gutter, we need to look to the art form of the digital era. I do believe books are making a comeback; the emptiness and chaos of the world today make it logical to turn to books. Of course, the most symbolic art form of the computer age is the video game. I have great faith in what it can do, but like the comic book in its earliest stage it is still immature, although a lot of the more mature comics of the early days are sadly forgotten (like Little Nemo) or were made in Europe. (like Tintin) And video games take much sustenance from literature, be it the genealogical connection of the Halo premise to Larry Nivens ringworld series, the role of the novel Alamut in inspiring Assassins Creed, the Chernobyl-style adaptation of the Strugatsky Bros with STALKER, the Randian universe of Bioshock or the splendid adaptations of the Witcher series. (Not to mention the video game novels they like in Japan)
This also means it is time that writers lost this "we're second best to movies, let's complain about it" attitude. Literature has always been fine on its own: movies, however, require literature to adapt. They need us, not vice versa. It'll be the same with video games. Because I think you put your finger on another reason the public doesn't care right now for the traditional arts the way they cared for Picasso's napkins: artists back then did what they did with outright confidence. They had to. Hiding behind a squiggly, Pollack-like sneeze of an abstraction is not courageous. It's cowardly. But because artists don't like to think like that - "it's too extreme, too simple, too binary to call something cowardly" - it's not a conclusion many in the art world are primed to reach. Unless they're like James Ellroy, who once said: "I write novels that nobody else has the balls to write."
One final thing (and then I'll end this long message, sorry about that XD ): The lesson we all should have taken from society's Game of Thrones experience was: George R. R. Martin butchering his own characters left and right was considered a good thing. I don't think it's good or bad, and truth be told R. R. Martin is not the best fantasy writer. But that doesn't matter any more than it matters if the Rich Men North of Richmond guy lacks Willie Nelson's cowboy professionalism. Neither of them hide behind squiggly lines. And people like that. Now the last two Song of Ice and Fire books are probably the most anticipated books in the world, and more anticipated than any film or photography collection, apart from how people felt about the MCU when Endgame came out. And yes, the show gave R. R. Martin a boost. But not a temporary one. I think fans long for those two last novels more than they long for another cinematic adaptation.
My lodestone on how to think about the modern art market is Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, this excellent essay is a perfect complement!
Missing: role of CIA using a budget of 200M (billions in today money) to promote abstract art as rival to nasty commie realism (prone to you know, protest things). No conspiracy theory: check stubs, correspondence, all now in public record. See Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (2000). Those “critics” you reference weren’t “trying to understand” the art, they were paid to make a narrative to fool the public.
Sweet piece. It gave me a lot to think about. So as usual, I'll probably leave a very long comment. XD
While the role of art in the Cold War was a thing, two things can be true at the same time. And I can see this reaction to modernity being one of them. On the whole, however, I think the fear was less justified than it may have been at the time. In terms of the literature/motion picture struggle, how often do we hear that an adaptation is never as good as the book, even if there are more good adaptations than we'd like to believe? Sure we'll watch that adaptation, but we've never been fully convinced of film's triumph over literature and it's not just readers who say that. I think it's the same with visual arts vs. photography: where are you more likely to go in Paris, the Louvre or a photo gallery? Even those who are passionate about photography will probably go to both.
As for visual art, the reason people weren't convinced by, say, the red square was quite simple: a red square is just a red square, nothing more. So people feel like contemporary art is a scam, and I don't disagree. It may well be that visual art is at a loss of where to go: for those who think that, I think they should peruse the paintings of the late Zdzislaw Beksinski who, apart from the naive painters, gives the best sense of direction of where to go from here. (Though that's just my opinion)
But be it painting or literature, I don't believe the tech arts are as much of a threat to the traditional arts as we think. After all, how did Oprah and Jeff Bezos become some of the richest people on the planet? Through books. Who became richer than the Queen? J.K. Rowling. And no matter how many contemporary books are written, no matter how much the classic writers are demonized as "old white men," the fact of the matter is: we're still drawn to the classics more than anything postmodern. If anything, people are sick of the postmodernists even if they can't fully ditch Pynchon (and sometimes DeLillo). Whereas Oprah's and Bezos' net work comes in large part from the populace's future anticipation of writing that's at least as good as the classics. We're still more likely to want to visit the Louvre or the Musee d'Orsay or the Uffizi in Florence than the Guggenheim. Hell, travelers to Europe are a lot more likely to want to visit the great cathedrals even if they are hardcore atheists than, say, the Bauhaus or the brutalist postwar relics. Beauty and quality matter, as do spirituality. (Which is also another thing the arts back then possessed that we do not)
But if that realization is alien to us, I think it's been for the simple fact that from the 1920s until recently, we've been living in the glory days of film. It's not just that the film medium was ascendant: film could deliver. From Buster Keaton to very recently we've been inundated with a lot of very good films, including cult movies with curious philosophical premises and even blockbusters have had food for thought. (like the X-Men movies) Just as the Middle Ages were the glory days of cathedrals and the Renaissance the glory days of painting in Florence. Different eras have different strengths in the arts. But now, Hollywood has become a parody of its former self, churning out remakes and sequels with only profits in mind and not art. Even those movies from the 2010s that are good are seldom, if ever, original, and though I can't comment much on that I suspect there won't be much to cherish from this huge Netflix boom, justified solely by the weak argument that quantity can trump quality as a metric of measuring cultural strength, even as our greater understanding of the Middle Ages lays that corpse to rest.
The same with photography. The great photographers were great because film photography produced so few pictures it needed a human vision to guide it so as to seek out that perfect photogenic moment. Now it is the most oversaturated art form in the world, more than literature. And when you can snap your camera a gajillion times and just choose the best one out of the bunch, there's nothing artistic about that. I appreciate fruit pickers as much as the next guy, but nobody has ever argued that fruit picking is an art. And they haven't made that argument for a good reason: they know it's not an argument they can win.
In other words: now that the late 20th-century mediums of art are in the gutter, we need to look to the art form of the digital era. I do believe books are making a comeback; the emptiness and chaos of the world today make it logical to turn to books. Of course, the most symbolic art form of the computer age is the video game. I have great faith in what it can do, but like the comic book in its earliest stage it is still immature, although a lot of the more mature comics of the early days are sadly forgotten (like Little Nemo) or were made in Europe. (like Tintin) And video games take much sustenance from literature, be it the genealogical connection of the Halo premise to Larry Nivens ringworld series, the role of the novel Alamut in inspiring Assassins Creed, the Chernobyl-style adaptation of the Strugatsky Bros with STALKER, the Randian universe of Bioshock or the splendid adaptations of the Witcher series. (Not to mention the video game novels they like in Japan)
This also means it is time that writers lost this "we're second best to movies, let's complain about it" attitude. Literature has always been fine on its own: movies, however, require literature to adapt. They need us, not vice versa. It'll be the same with video games. Because I think you put your finger on another reason the public doesn't care right now for the traditional arts the way they cared for Picasso's napkins: artists back then did what they did with outright confidence. They had to. Hiding behind a squiggly, Pollack-like sneeze of an abstraction is not courageous. It's cowardly. But because artists don't like to think like that - "it's too extreme, too simple, too binary to call something cowardly" - it's not a conclusion many in the art world are primed to reach. Unless they're like James Ellroy, who once said: "I write novels that nobody else has the balls to write."
One final thing (and then I'll end this long message, sorry about that XD ): The lesson we all should have taken from society's Game of Thrones experience was: George R. R. Martin butchering his own characters left and right was considered a good thing. I don't think it's good or bad, and truth be told R. R. Martin is not the best fantasy writer. But that doesn't matter any more than it matters if the Rich Men North of Richmond guy lacks Willie Nelson's cowboy professionalism. Neither of them hide behind squiggly lines. And people like that. Now the last two Song of Ice and Fire books are probably the most anticipated books in the world, and more anticipated than any film or photography collection, apart from how people felt about the MCU when Endgame came out. And yes, the show gave R. R. Martin a boost. But not a temporary one. I think fans long for those two last novels more than they long for another cinematic adaptation.