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Tntroduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny In the early 1960s, when I was a baby critic in Australia, it seemed that faraway New York had become a truly imperial culture, heir to Rome and Paris, setting the norms of discourse for the rest of the world’s art. This sense of imperial role (and the nervousness it induced in the provinces) would much later be summed up by Irving Sandler in the titl~ of his fine book on Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of Amerhan Painting. Between 1945 and 1970, the quarter-century that saw the rise and flowering of the New York School, three generations of remarkable painters and sculptors seemed to have taken centrality away from Europe. First there had been the Abstract Expressionists: Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, David Smith, Gorky, Guston, Krasner and Motherwell. Then there were the slightly younger painters whom Clement Greenberg and his school had nominated as the continuers of art history, the ones on whom the future of painting as a high art was alleged (wrongly, as it turned out) to depend: Noland, Olitski, Frankenthaler and especially Louis. And then the younger men and a few women who rose at the beginning of the 1960s, Johns and Rauschenberg, followed by Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Warhol, Kelly, Stella, Judd, Smithson, Morris, di Suvero, Serra; from there one could make up one’s own list, which by the end of the 1970S might well have included painters such as Susan Rothenberg and Brice Marden and sculptors such as Joel Shapiro. And of course, Philip Guston again-reborn, since 1968, as a figurative artist of extraordinary power. It would be foolish to claim that 1945-70 in New York rivaled 18701914 in Paris. America has never produced an artist to rival Picasso or 4/ INTRODUCTION Matisse, or an art movement with the immense resonance of Cubism. But marvelous work was done there nevertheless. And it C30 certainly be said of the New York School that its artists often showed those “native” qualities listed by Frederick Jackson Turner in his history of the American frontier, qualities that seem inseparable from a younger America and are looked back on with nostalgia by Americans now: “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients … that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism … and withal that buoyancy and exuberance.” One saw this triumph from afar, going down Fifty-seventh Street with its tramping legions and subjugated Gauls, its gold. and purple and apotropaic cries. In Australia one’s response to it came out as a sighresignation to one’s own cultural irrelevance. We were already used to that, since for most of the two-hundred-year history of white Australia the colonial experience had bitten deeply into us and caused a reflex known as the Cultural Cringe. The Cultural Cringe is the assumption that whatever you do in the field of writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, dance or theater is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society. It is the reflex of the kid with low self-esteem hoping that his work will please the implacable father but secretly despairing that it can. The essence of cultural colonialism is that you demand of yourself that your work measure up to standards that cannot be shared or debated where you live. By the manipulation of such standards almost anything can be seen to fail, no matter what sense of finesse, awareness and delight it may produce in its actual setting. There is no tyranny like the tyranny of the nnseen masterpiece. That was our predicament. In Australia we had art schools teaching people how to make Cezannes, bur our museums had no real Cezannes to show us. The seen and fully experienced masterpiece tends to liberate. Great art is seldom repressive. But reproduction is to aesthetic awareness what telephone sex is to sex: in Australia, without knowing it, we were anticipating that worthless “freedom” from the original art objeCt, the sense of floating among its media clones, which would be so lauded in 1980s New York as part of the postmodernist experience. It was stifling to independent judgment. There have been fine painters in Australia, at least since the rise of its Impressionist school in the 1880s.One can very well imagine an “alternative history” of twentieth-century art with some Australian artists in it, Arthur Boyd, for instance, or Fred Williams. But we Australians tended to be afraid to claim our own qualities, for fear of looking gauche-not The Decline of the City of Mahagonny / 5 just to others but to ourselves as well. Much the same thing had happened earlier in the United States, of course. Few people today would dispute that Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer were among the greatest of nineteenth-century realists. Very few Americans wanted to believe that thirty years ago, for fear of being judged provincial by other, Francophile Americans. In Australia, for fear of seeming unsophisticated, we kept wondering: Is this up to international standards? And we had no answer, because we could not articulate these “standards” for ourselves. In this we may not have been so different from most American artists living out of easy reach of New York in the fifties and sixties. Thirty years ago, Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style. We in Australia looked at it with awe. The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores (since the paintings themselves did not cross the Pacific) was the magazine ARTnews. Its hagiographic tone was clear. Except for the titans of the history books, whose work we hadn’t seen either–from Michelangelo and Leonardo down to Picasso and Matisse-we had never read the kinds of claims made for any artist that Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess made for figures such as Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. They were grand enough to stifle aesthetic dissent. Only contact with the originals could have tested them, and we could not see the originals. Thus, although we did not know it, we were in the situation of many American artists oIltside New York in 1960-flat on our backs, waiting for the missionary. The copy of ARTnews would arrive and we would dissect it, cutting out the black-and-white reproductions and pinning thcm on the studio walL One was, say, a Newman. You had just read onc of Torn Hess’s discourses on how Newman’s vertical zip was Adam, or the primal act of division of light from darkness, or the figure of the unnamable Yahweh himself. How could you disagree? On what could you base your trivial act of colonial dissent? A mere reproduction, ‘two inches by three? But Yahweh doesn’t show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings. And if you got to see the paintings, what if you still didn’t see it? Did that mean that his terrible and sublime visage was not there either? Of course not; it meant only that you had a bad eye; or that Yahweh doesn’t show himself to goyim from the South Pacific And since it is difficult for the young or otherwise uninitiated to avoid, still less be skeptical about, the language in which peak experiences are offered to them, you were apt to assume that it was your own unpreparedness or sheer obtuseness that prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman’s zip or Rothko’s fuzzy rectangle. This act of unwonted humility was made by thousands of people 6/ INTRODUCTION concerned with the making, distribution, teaching and judgment of art, not only in places like Australia but throughout Europe and-not incidentally-in America in the mid-1960s. They resigned themselves to an imperial situation. Imperialism creates provincialism: it standardizes things, straightens out the edges. The periphery yearns for the reassurance of the center-to submerge its fragile and only partly definable identity in something manifestly strong. Just as late imperial Roman sculpture looks much the same all around the Mediterranean, and statues of Lenin vary little from the Finland Station to Tashkent (although the god’s features get more Asiatic the farther east they trave!), so the modernist. image tends toward standardization from the centers out. The difference today is that instead of an imperialism of place we have an imperialism of the market, operating internationally. From Basel to Canberra, from Minneapolis to Venice, late-modern collections are bought from essentially the same menu touristiquej if Antarctica had a museum of modern art, the penguins would,get to contemplate an Ellsworth Kelly, a mock-Tantric watercolor by Francesco Clemente, a straw-and-mudscape by Anselm Kiefer and a nice lump of frozen fat by Joseph Beuys. So what has this done to the vision of Imperial Manhattan, at the end of what probably has been the worst decade in the history of Americart art? In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go. Perhaps some people already feel stirrings of nostalgia for the eighties. If so, their feelings are premature. If cultural cycles did not have their own momentum and life span, neither to be measured in decades, one would now murmur a small prayer of gratitude for release and reach for the Maalox. But we will not be out of the eighties for years, because few of the social conditions that fostered the decade’s cultural traits have changed or seem ready to. The decade may be officially dead, but it won’t lie down just yet. In the eighties the scale of cultural feeding became gross, and its aliment coarse; bulimia, that neurotic cycle of gorge and puke, the driven consumption and regurgitation of images and reputations, became our main cultural metaphor. Never had there been so many artists, so much art vying for attention, so many collectors, so many inflated claims and so little sense of measure. The inflation of the market, the victory of promotion over connois- The Decline of the City of Mahagonny / 7 seurship, the manufacture of art-related glamour, the poverty of art training, the embattled state of museums-these will not vanish, as at the touch of a wand, now that 1990 is here. But at the same time, few people outside the United States continue to believe in the New York imperium; Europe has risen again, and with a vengeance. There is much to suggest that in the 1980s New York not only lost its primacy as an art center but also began to go the way of its predecessors, Paris in the 1950Sand Rome in the 1670s-overthe hill, into decline. The point is not that New York has been replaced by some other city as center. It has not been, and will not be. Rather, the idea of the single art center is now on the verge of disappearing. New York’s decline is only a prelude to that situation. This sense of loss, which was rather more than a mere faltering of creative momentum, was not confined to New York. It may be that Picasso’s death in 1973 marked the end of a period in Western art as emphatically as the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides in the same year, 406 B.C., marked the end of high tragic drama in Greece. Tragedies continued to be written in Greek, and some quite good ones too; but the age of tragedies was past and that of the histories had begun. Weare all conditioned by the art market and the decadent myth of modernist progress into thinking that there is no such thing as a slump in cultural history. But slumps do happen, and we are in one now. When Americans in the fifties and ‘sixties eagerly claimed that their art had superseded that of Europe, their eagerness was itself a period phenomenon. The American Revolution had held, deep in its heart, the vision of a corrupt Europe, a Europe whose hold was long and tenacious but which could be demystified by showing its moral obsoleteness. The idea that Europe was culturally exhausted was an importlnt ingredient of Ameri. can self-esteem. Its ancient craftiness, its subtlety, its strata of memory, its persistent embrace of elitist against “democratic” cultural values: these, in American eyes, were grounds for suspicion and even hostility. And if an artist openly espoused them or seemed for a moment lost in admiration of them-Robert Motherwell, for instance-then he must acquit himself of charges of self-indulgence, as though he were claiming experiences that were not truly his. Europe must be transcended, outdone. Thus the power of Bernard Berenson’s appeal to the plutocrats of Chicago, New York and Boston at the turn of the century-just as, under his guidance, the art of the Italian Renaissance came pouring into America at the start of its museum age-was his promise of a new American Renaissance which would outdo the old, whose paintings and sculpture would nevertheless 8/ INTRODUCTION furnish indispensable refinement to the new. It may be that, as an American, Berenson actually believed this: one cannot be sure. But his audiences certainly did. It was a desire that none too subliminally shaped the program of history presented by the most influential of all American museums, the Museum of Moder” Art in New York: the passing of the torch from failing Europe to vig’lS America. But the “American Century” whose arrival was eagerly proclaimed after 1945 is now at an end. It finished ignobly amid the glitzy triumphalism of Reagan’s presidency, and its squandered resources cannot simply be willed back into being. New York’s loss of vitality as an art center runs parallel to events in the larger culture of politics, economics and mass media. It is part of a general aging of the United States: its stagnation, its willing surrender to ephemeral media images and unargued persuasion. It is connected, not causally but by analogy, to the extraordinary decay of American public life. But it has also been caused by a loss of talent to painting and sculpture, itself connected to a general decline in educational standards. The idea of the hegemony of American art in the fifties and . sixties-the belief that it was the mission of New York to set cultural standards for Europe and the Western cultures of the Pacific, including Australia-:sprang from the narcissistic assumption that people everywhere aspired to the condition of Americans, so that aesthetic issues that filled the New York horizon could be transferred anywhere else, regardless of local traditions, imagery, preoccupations. This reflected the larger political assumptions Americans made at the time: their belief in their country’s moral leadership in a Manichaean world, clearly divided between disinterested American light and devouring Russian darkness; the conviction of some of its leaders that, in Henry Luce’s words, “no nation in history, except ancient Israel, was so obviously designed for some special phase of God’s eternal purpose.” Nobody of any intelligence believes this kind of fustian today in politics, and in the visual arts, where New York lives in a state of continuous hype but diminished expectation, it is merely the echo of a lost time: an echo Americans still eagerly listen to, in their nostalgia for a time when their country seemed young and powerful and capable of producing anything at will. Nothing comes around again. Who could possibly compare the efforts of our fin de siecle in the visual arts with those of a hundred years ago? Merely to invite the comparison seems so unfairly loaded against the scale of our cultural expectations as to be, well, impolite. The nineteenth century went out in a blaze of glory. The period 1885-19°5was one of striking cultural energy and confidence, not a decline The Decline of the City of Mahagonny / 9 and not by any means a mere prelude to modernism. Europe then had, among others, Cezanne, Monet, Seurat, Degas, Matisse, van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Rodin; we, the pessimist might say, have network television and the pallid ghost of Andy Warhol. The more hopeful, or less dismissive, could readily name twenty or so painters and sculptors of real merit who are at work today, some in Britain, some in Europe, some in New York: from senior figures such as Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Antoni Tapies, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Arthur Boyd, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, through the middle generation (llya Kabakov in Moscow; Avigdor Arikha in Paris; sculptors Magdalena Abakanowicz, Nancy Graves, William Tucker and Joel Shapiro; in England, Frank Auerbach, Howard I-Iodgkin and R. B, Kitaj), to such younger artists as Anselm Kiefer, Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney, Sean Scully, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Tony Cragg, and maybe one or two hopeful group events such as the collaboration of Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), Nevertheless, although the eye of the future will find artists to respect when it looks back on our time, they are not likely to seem as consequential as those of a century ago. And the good ones will look like raisins bedded, very far apart, in the swollen duff of mediocrity that constitutes most late-twentieth-century art. Whether the bad museum art of our own day–David Salle, Gilbert & George, and other deliciae-is better or worse than its late-nineteenth-century equivalents, the stuff that Cezanne and van Gogh had to slog their way past, is no longer an open question; because of the overpopulation of the art world there is far more of it, and thanks to the lack of discrimination on the market-museum axis it is, if anything, somewhat worse, The future cannot be relied on to value what is most fashionable in one’s own day, and the remembered figures in 2090 may not be those popular in 1989. Who, in 1890,would have predicted’that the obscure and clumsy Cezanne would cause a revolution in valu,es that would oust the masterly, “impeccable” diction of Bouguereau from the history books? (But then, who in 1960 would have bet on Bouguereau’s return to our museums in the eclectic revivalism of the 1980s?)The most famous painter in Northern Europe in the 1890Swas not Gustave Klimt, Egon Schiele or even Edvard Munch, but an Austrian named Hans Makart. His studio in Vienna, a huge hangar of a place full of antlers, Persian rugs and palms, was a shrine of pilgrimage for collectors from all over Europe, In it he hung his enormous paintings-battle scenes, varied with bits of mythology for gentlemen who preferred nymphs, Journalists hung on his table talk, Public belief in Makart’s genius was second only to his own, Senti- IO / INTRODUCTION mental and bombastic, he was the Julian Schnabel of the Ringstrasse, with the difference that Makart could draw. And today he is almost wholly forgotten–except in Vienna, where he remains a cultural curiosity of its Belle Epoque. The last fin de sickle, the period between ,885 and ‘905, was greeted by the middle classes of Western Europe and America as a time of inordinate hope, although its hopes were not the ones we have today. Imperial thinking-French, German, British and, in the form of a belief in “manifest destiny,” American:.-was at its peak. The presiding metaphor was one of conquest and development: of oceans, air, mineral strata, jungles and foreign peoples-Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the Law.” No limit to the promise of technological development was apparent to the men who ran this world, and the idea that the globe was itself a finite resource would have struck them as absurd-largely because they did not have the industrial capacity, as we do, to exploit it to the limit, or the range of markets to support such an exploitation. Their world was much less crowded than ours. It was not on the ‘very edge of being used up. We think of preservation, they thought of expansion. But if established power was hopeful, so was radical dissent. A hundred years ago the promise of radicalism was young and, before its ruin at the hands of Lenin, Stalin and their heirs in this most murderous of all centuries, relatively innocent. For instance, the political relations of some French artists and writers with the radical left-first Courbet with his friend Proudhon, then such figures as Paul Signac, Felix Feneon, Stephane Mallarme and the editors of La Revue Blanche with anarchists of the ,880s and ,890s-went on in a spirit, however naive, of hope for betterment of the world through universal brotherhood. They may have been wrong, but at least they were decently wrong. They did not have the flippant, reamed-out cynicism that passes for “radicality” in the art industry’s embrace of Jean Baudrillard. And no politically inclined artist then faced what his modern counterpart must contend with, and in a massmedia environment lose to: the draining away of art’s power as a witness. In the visual arts, the confidence of the last fin de siecle had its echoes. They showed themselves (as it were) subliminally, in the belief that Nature was still an uhfailing regulator of thought and an inexhaustible storehouse’ of forms for the artist or the architect, while “exotic” cultural traditions-Japanese for van Gogh, Whistler or Monet; Breton or Polynesian for Gauguin; African for the young Picasso-could be raided at will. (The desire to be primitive was very ‘much a function of fin-de-siecle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.) The Decline of the City of Mahagonny / ” Moreover, the excellence of fin-de-siecle pamtmg and sculpture rested on a firm belief in the artist’s ability to consult and use the past traditions of his own culture, freely and without prophylactic irony-as summarized in Cezanne’s belief that “the way to Nature lies through the Louvre, and the way to the Louvre through Nature.” Michelangelo was available to Auguste Rodin in a way that he may be to no sculptor now. No living architect anywhere in the West today can bring to inherited motifs and crafts the sublime freedom with which Luis Domenech y Montaner deployed his Catalan traditions of ironwork, glass and ceramics in the Palau de la Musica Catalana (‘905-08) in Barcelona. . This was so partly because no myth of cultural repudiation (as enshrined in Futurism, Dada and Surrealism) had yet arisen, although there was certainly an emphasis on the renewal of art’s language, and partly because the training of artists had changed little, in its essential emphases, since the sixteenth century. Thus the Belle Epoque’s legacy to later artists, Mir6, Picasso and Matisse, for example, was fecund and continuous. If Jacopo Pontormo had walked into the life class of one of the big teaching ateliers of Paris in ,890 he would hllve seen immediately what was going on; if the ,same time machine were to deposit him in Walt Disney’s Academy for the Briefly New, the California Institute of the Arts, in ‘990, he might not recognize it as an art school at all: and who could blame him? For nearly a quarter of a century, late-modernist art teaching (especially in America) has increasingly succumbed to the fiction that the values of the so-called academy-meaning, in essence, the transmission of disciplined skills based on drawing from the live model and the natural motif-were hostile to “creativity.” This fiction enabled Americans to ignore the inconvenient fact that virtually all artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between ,890 and ‘950, Beckmann no less than Picasso, Mir6 and de Kooning as well as Degas or Matisse, were formed by the atelier system and could no more have done without the particular skills it inculcated than an aircraft can fly without an airstrip. The philosophical beauty of Mondrian’s squares and grids begins with the empirical beauty of his apple trees. Whereas thanks to America’s tedious obsession with the therapeutic, its art schools in the ‘960s and ‘970S tended to become creches, whose aim was less to transmit the difficult skills of painting and sculpture than to produce “fulfilled” personalities. At this no one could fail. Besides, it was easier on the teachers if they left their students to do their own thing. It meant they could do their own thing, and not teach–especially since so many of them could not draw either. A few schools, such as the Pennsyl- 12/ INTRODUCTION vania Academy of the Fine Arts, held out against this and tried to give their students a solid grounding. But they were very few. Other factors contributed to the decay of the fine-arts tradition in !merican schools in the sixties and seventies. One was the increased attachment of art teaching to universities, which meant that theory tended to be raised above practice and making. Thinking deep thoughts about histories and strategies was more noble than handwork, and it produced an exaggerated drift toward the conceptual. This interlocked in a peculiarly damaging way with reliance on reproduction of works of art instead of direct contact with the originals. Few people now remember a time when the thirty-five-millimeter color slide was not the main fodder of art teaching, both for artists and for art historians. For the last quarter-century slides and not originals have been the major source of most students’ contact with art, and this has relentle~sly nudged their experience toward the disembodied, the conceptual, the not there. The size and the number of art classes have made the didactic museum visit obsolete, and in any case most art schools are out of convenient reach of great museums. As Cleve Gray recently pointed out in Partisan Review, slides and reproductions have reduced, and for some all but destroyed, the sense of uniqueness and particular scale of works of art, the physical presence Walter Benjamin called their “aura.” One learns from the image flat in the book, cast oversize on the lighted screen, or glimpsed undersize in the slide viewer. Committees award prizes and fellowships on the basis of slides. Writers write from them. Collectors buy from them. But what is there? An image of an image. Not the thing, but a bright phantasm, a visual parody, whose relatIOn to the original and actual work of art is that of a shrunken head to a real one. In the slide or reproduction, no work of art appears in its true size or with its. vital qualities of texture, color and the recorded movemc;nt of the shaping hand intact. A Klee, a Pollock or a lunette of the Sistine Chapel-all undergo the same abstraction, the same loss of presence. Impartially, they lose one of the essential factors of aesthetic experience, the size of the artwork relative to our sense of our own bodies: its scale. There were, after all, reasons why Picasso painted Three Women, 1908, on a canvas six and a half by six feet, and Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, on a surface one-fortieth that size. The former he meant to stand up before the eye sculpturally, like the Michelangelo Slaves, which are its distant ancestors, figures locked sleepily in their red stony space, their slow torsion speaking kinesthetically to one’s own sense of bodily weight The Decline of the City of Mahagonny //13 and size; the latter accepts one’s gaze more intimately, like a view through a little window. . But when both come out the same apparent sife in a plate or a slide, the penumbra of meaning inherent in their actual scale as paintings cannot survive. Does this lie behind the peculiar confusion of size with scale that afflicted so much American painting in the eighlies–the inflation of the artwork in its pursuit of a factitious “importance”‘? A slide gives you the subject, the nominal image f)f the work, without conveying a true idea of its pictorial essence. You cannot think and feel your way back into the way something was made by looking at a slide: only by studying the real thing. And no tradition of making can be transmitted without such empathy. Did this foster the dull blatancy of so much recent American painting, all impact and no resonance? Have the falsifications of the reproduced image fed back into the new originals, cutting out those very qualities which, by their nature, cannot survive reproduction-subtleties of drawing, touch and brushwork, 0f color and tone, that slow up the eye and encourage, beyond the quick look, a slow absorption? But the real disjuncture between the fins de siede lies deeper than this. A hundred years ago, painting and sculpture were still socially dominant forms: they continued to supply, to an extent n(.w all but lost to us, the visual codes by which one interpreted the world. Mass media, except for print, did not exist. Photography had begun to fill the gap between fantasy and reality, reducing the effort of firsthand experience. But it was not yet a democratic medium: few could take their own pictures (that would begin in [888, with George Eastman’s preloaded cameras), and halftone reproduction, which put photographs on the pages of the daily press, was still uncommon. – Cinema was not quite born (Louis Lumiere invented the cinematograph in 1894), and the vast popular reach of movies lay far in the future, outside social imagination. Not until 1925 would recognizable human features be transmitted by television. Nor would TV become a mass hypnotic in the United States until after 1945- Elsewhere in the West its advent would be even longer delayed; if you were born before 1940 in Australia you could reach college-graduate age without watching, let alone having, a television set. Because mass visual media hardly existed in the world of our grand- 14/ INTRODUCTION parents and great-grandparents, pamtmg and sculpture carried more weight: the weight of tradition, dreams and social commemoration. The very idea of “radical” change in painting and sculpture gained its impetus from their traditional primacy and lost it when that primacy was lost. The political leader in 1890 might crave a bronze figure of himself in the square, but that kind of propaganda is now archaic-replaced by the forty-fivesecond attack commercial, as public oratory has been replaced by the sound bite and the managed press conference. When Parisian gallerygoers in the 1870S recoiled in horror from the “leprous” blue shadows in a Monet, it was because they felt an important contract had been brokenthe agreement between painting, as a primary form of social discourse, and reality. No painting can offend anyone in this way today, because painting no longer has such primacy: it is not our index of the real. Instead, photography enrages the moralist, as Americans saw with the recent imbroglio between Senator Jesse Helms and the National Endowment for the Arts over the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. If that overrated photographer, instead of sticking a bullwhip up his ass and pretending to be the devil in front of his own Hasselblad, had done it on network television, the fuss would have been even greater. But if the image had been painted, who would have much cared? In 1989 the average American spent nearly half of his or her conscious life watching television. Two generations of Americans-including American artists-have now grown up in front of the TV set, their consciousness permeated by its shuttle of bright images, their attention span shrunken by its manipulative speed, their idea of success dictated by its collapse of fame into celebrity, their anxiety level (at least among the smarter ones, again including artists) raised by its sheer pervasive power. This has not been a matter of choice, let alone fault. The power of television goes beyond anything the fine arts have ever wanted or achieved. Nothing like this Niagara of visual gabble had even been imagined a hundred years ago. American network television drains the world of meaning; it makes reality seem dull, slow and avoidable. It is our “floating world.” It tends to abort the imagination by leaving kids nothing to imagine: every hero and demon is there, raucously explicit, precut-a world of stereotypes, too authoritative for imagination to develop or change. No wonder it has predisposed American artists toward similar stereotypes. It is stupidly compelling, in a way that painting and sculpture, even in their worst moments of propaganda or sentimentality, are not. From Edgar Degas with his Kodak to Robert Rauschenberg with his silk screens, from Hanne Hoch with her clipped collages of news photos The Decline of the City of Mahagonny /15 to the use of TV and ads by the Fluxus group, modern artists have long been fascinated by the mass media. Rauschenberg or Lichtenstein could play with this fascination while still keeping their balance inside the fine-arts tradition. Warhol, a commercial artist to the core, took the step (gingerly, at first) outside it, in his acolyte’s embrace of the value-free apparitions of the Tube. The next generation of American artists, Andy’s children, followed him en masse. They could not imagine a fine-arts tradition that was not overshadowed by television. Accordingly, a peculiarly slack form of thinking (whose institutional site, in New Yark, was the Whitney Museum of American Art) arose about art and media. Nature is dead, culture is all, everything is mediated to the point where nothing can be seen in its true quality, representation determines all meaning, and the only way that “so-called high art” can engage with general perception is to step out of its old “elitist” traditions and follow the Yellow Brick Road of the “cutting edge” that leads through Deconstruction Flats and the Forest of Signs to Jeff Koons’s porcelain pigs. This trip turns out not to be worth taking. It has produced a clever novelty art of diminishing returns; far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art nave become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the general drain of concreteness from modern existence-the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life. The numbed eclecticism of eighties art, its fondness for pastiche and historical deck-shuffling, its vision of art history as a mere box of samples-these were the signs of a culture given over to surfaces, all style and no substance. Their imaginative drought reminds one of a sad Russian joke: Today you can order a steak by telephone-and get it by television. There are extreme differences between the values of painting and sculpture, and those of mass media. Art requires the long look. It is a physicll object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world. Its images do not pass. They can be contemplated, returned to, examined in the light of their own history. The work of art is layered and webbed with references to the inner and outer worlds that are not merely iconic. It can acquire (although it does not automatically have) a spiritual aspect, which rises from its power to evoke contemplation. Fine art is infinit~ly more than an array of social signs awaiting deconstruction. Its social reach is smaller than that of the mass media, and it finds the grounds for its survival in being what the mass media are not. It now seems that if one opens “art” 16/ INTRODUCTION to include more and more of the dominant media that have no relation to art, the alien goo takes over and the result is, at best, a hybrid form of short-impact conceptualism trying to be spectacle. Static, handmade visual art cannot furnish an answer to big media, or even an effective debunking of them. The working relation of most eighties artists to them has been that of a fairly tough fly to flypaper. One saw this in Robert Longo’s work in the early eighties-an oversize melange of technical sophistication and sentimental blatancy, with more wallop than resonance. It came, in a different form, in Barbara Kruger’s knockoffs of John Heartfield,’with their smugly “challenging” slogans about manipulated identity. It was even purer and duller in Jenny Holzer’s plaques and light-emitting-diode readouts (CHARISMA CAN jiE FATAL, and so forth)–failed epigrams that would be unpublishable as poetry but that survived in the art context, their prim didacticism so reminiscent of the virtuous sentiments the daughters of a pre-electronic America used to embroider on samplers. The work that got into the American limelight after Neo-Expressionism prided itself on its political correctness, but most of its messages might as well have been sent by Western Union. Probably the only A merican artist of this generation who managed to introduce a real shudder of feeling into media-based work was Cindy Sherman, enacting her parade of gender caricatures, bad dreams and grotesqueries for the camera. Not much of the art that really seems to matter is being made iri ~ew York today. There is a haunting parallel with Paris at the end of the fifties, when the French were busy persuading themselves that Soulages, Poliakoff, Hartung, Mathieu and other artists formed a generation that could eventually step into the shoes of the patriarchs of the Paris School, most of whom except Picasso and Braque were dead. Several important younger artists were alive and at work: Giacometti, Dubuffet, Balthus, , Helion. One could certainly believe that the tanks were not emptying. Yet today, for the first time in three hundred years, there is not one great artist at work in Paris. So it is with New York. The great city has gone on with frantic energy as a market center, an immense bourse on which every kind of art is traded for ever-escalating prices. But amid the growing swarm of new galleries, the premature canonizations and record bids and the conversion of much of its museum system into a promotional machine, its cultural vitality–its ability to inspire signi,ficant new art and foster it sanely-has been greatly reduced. In part this was due to economic pressures, notably from the real estate market, which deprived younger artists-along with small theater The Decline oj the City oj Mahagonny /17 companies, dance groups and the rest-of working space in Mannattan. Complaints about this are an old part of the texture of New York life, of course: even in the 1920Speople were complaining that Greenwich Village bohemia was dying on its feet, made homeless by what later journalists would call gentrification. But in the 1980s the supply of affordable workspace for artists in Manhattan finally ran out. ‘fhe idea of the New York painter in a big white downtown loft-I;ohemia with industrial spaces-is about as real as the notion that French painters wear berets and live in high studios in Montparnasse. The working bohemia of New York artists made its last stand in the very early seventies, when SoHo had no name, two galleries (Paula Cooper and Max Hutchinson) and two bars, Fanelli’s and the long-defunct Lllizzi’s. All the ground-floor spaces on West Broadway now occupied by fashion boutiques and art galleries then held small tenacious businesses-hard wood-flooring companies, knife grinders, plastic injection molders, fabric offcut warehou,ses: survivors of an industrial past that went back to the Civil War, whose pragmatism seemed to underwrite the kind of art that was being made by semilegal tenants with Murphy beds and industrial leases (no heat after no) in the lofts above. The annals of this last American bohemia remain largely unwritten. But the loft on Prince Street that rented for $150 a month in 1971and sold as a co-op floor for $25,000 in 1974 carried a price tag of $750,000 by 1987. Such artists as live in SoHo got their places fifteen or twenty years ago. Today, any walkup space in the Lower East Side, complete with the crack dealers on the doorstep and a derelict pissing in his pants on the second-floor landing, rents for a dollar per square foot per month-say $1,000 for the reasonable minimum a painter needs to work. So artists cross the river to find workspace in Bayonne or Hoboken, and commute in to see the shows; at which point they may as well stop calling themselves “New York artists” at all, being part of no community. Where a young painter thinking of moving to Manhattan in 1970might have armed herself for the struggle of life in New York, by the mid-1980s she was more likely to give up the idea altogether and stay in Chicago. Thus, although Manhattan at the end of the 1980s is rivaled by no other American city as a monumental center and a culture market, its ability to draw in new talent and foster it in ways that make sense has almost gone. This is a poor omen. It was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its gravitational field keeps drawing more talent in, 18/ INTRODUCTION as in the combustion of a star, to sustain the reaction. The process is now dying. And the sense of entropy is compounded by the decay of New York civic life, not a problem in Paris. Up to a certain point, the grit, dirt and struggle of Manhattan were a stimulus to artists; all kinds of special poetries and particular looks arose from its aggressive materialism-uncil the late eighties, when the sheer inequality of New York became overpowering. Doubt now arose: Could a city with such extremes of Sardanapalian wealth and Calcutta-like misery foster a sane culture? Did it take more out of an artist than it put in? Why not stay in San Francisco or Chicago (or Barcelona, Berlin or Sydney), visit New York occasionally for its museums and galleries, but otherwise ignore its pull? New York had never been paradise, and living there, below the kind of income level enjoyed by only one American in forty, had never been easy. (Those who complain about the street squalor of Manhattan as though it were something new should consul~ the chronicles of New York in the 1840S,. when such garbage collection as existed on Broadway was done by packs of half-wild pigs.) But it was in New York that the essence of the Reagan years-private affluence and public squalor-cavorted in the limelight. Half of the public officials o( the Koch administration seemed, like those of the Reagan administration in Washington, to be . involved in some kind of criminal scam or shameless conflict of interest. Manhattan’s middle class, the protein of urban life, felt squeezed between a small, repellently ostentatious crust of the newly rich and an increasingly demoralized mass of the hopelessly poor, and stepped up its rate of migra-‘ / tion to the boroughs across the bridges. Television news and the tabloid press grew ever more debased. Reality shortage, induced by an inflated cult of promotion and celebrity, was acute. The sense of civic space began to collapse under the pressure of real estate greed, exacerbated racism, the fear of crime, the exploding drug market. And then there was AIDS. Not one of these woes was confined to Sodom-on-the-Hudson, although New Yorkers (with their appetite for disaster scenarios) were apt to talk as though Manhattan were their special laboratory, a sort of Island of Dr. Moreau in which every kind o~ deformity was breeding. But social tensions, even plagues, do not in themselves guarantee the decline of a great art center. Delacroix’s Paris was no Utopia either, except for the few, and many Londoners two hundred years ago experienced their city as New Yorkers do today: money-mad and dangerous to live in, threatened by a large “criminal class” and sapped by proletarian addiction. But the difference between then and now is that the pattern of world cultural activity has made the very idea of the single, imperial center obsolete. New The Decline of the City of Mahagonny /19 .york, in other words, remains a center but not, as its art world used to imagine, the center. Moreover, its centrality is.based mainly on the market, and the market has nothing to do with cultural vitality. A few years ago, a popular neo-Marxist argument (popular in academe, anyway) was that finesse of taste and connoisseurship were only masks for market activitygenteel ways in which a ravenous commercialism could spin euphemisms about itself. Anyone who believed that should look at the art market today and be corrected. It is now run almost entirely by finance manipulators, fashion victims and rich ignoramuses. The collector as connoisseur has been squeezed out of it. Connoisseurship is an impediment to its progress-mere dust on the road down which the inflationary march proceeds. Under the market’s malignant sway, genuine expertise is virtually redundant and will soon be entirely so. The market’s object is to erase all values that might impede anything at all from becoming a “masterpiece.” In this situation, whose epicenter is New York, the role of the museum, like that of the critic, is attenuated. And because it has never paid more than lip service to the idea of state patronage of the arts, the United States has no dominant cultural institutions that are not tied into the market. In the eighties more paper wealth was generated in New York than in any other city, at any other time, in human history. Greenmail, junk bonds, leverage and the precarious liquidity of an overgeared credit economy transformed the art world into the Art Industry, turnover immense, regulations none. What was a picture worth? One bid below what someone would pay for it. And what would that person pay for it? Basically what he or she could borrow. And how much art could dance for how long on that particular pinhead? Nobody had, or has, the slightest idea. What is certain is that nobody foresaw the hyperinflation of the market; and that when the bubble bursts, or softly deflates, as bubbles do, nobody will have foreseen that either. Twenty years ago, the idea that any work of art made in the past century would sell for a million dollars seemed like science fiction to most people. In 1972, when the National Gallery o{ Canberra paid about $2 million for Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, the price made world headlines and contributed, marginally, to the Australian public’s acceptance of the fall of the Whitlam government soon afterward. Today, when someone pays five or ten million for a modern painting, the event rates no more than a sentence or two in the auction reports of The New York Times. We have come to take it for granted that art should be 20 / INTRODUCTION alienatingly expensive: it seems normal that its price should violate our sense of decency.l Although art has always been a commodity, it loses its inherent value and its social use when it is treated only as such. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of contemplating it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning and visual experience under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then hidden in storage, what would happen to one’s sense of literature-the tissue of its meanings that sustains a common discourse? “Where works of art are rare,” young Goethe wrote on first visiting Naples, “rarity itself is a value; it is only when they are common … that one can learn their intrinsic worth.” The truth of these words is very nearly lost to us, in a culture wrecked by its own commercialization., What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture. At the end of the eighties there may have been five hundred people in the world who could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents at all. Never before have the impulses of art appreciation and collecting been so nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display as in the late 1980s, and nowhere more so than in the United States, especially when the Japanese are buying. The new relations between “price” and “value” were epitomized at Sotheby’s New York auction of Andy Warhol’s collection in 1988, when necrophiles and relic hunters competed to pay $20,000 apiece for cookie jars that partook of the dead artist’s aura. They were pushed from obscenity into farce in the spring of 1990, when one Japanese investor paid $160.2 million for a van Gogh and a Renoir. Yet the game had losers as well as winners, and by the”late eighties the losers, interestingly enough, were American: chiefly, American museums; and through the museums the American public. The art-market boom has been an unmitigated disaster for the public life of art. It has distorted the ground of people’s reaction to painting and sculpture. Thirty ‘Just how unforeseen the change has been may be sensed by consulting a later essay in this collection, “Art and Money,” originally wmten for the University of Chicago’S Harold Rosenberg Memorial Lecture in ‘984’ At that time 1 took $10 million as the “absurd” price that a work of art (nouonally, a great Raphael) might some day allain. By 1989 no great Raphaels had come on the block, but $10 million ,eemed a commonplace figure in a market where a Jasper Johns had made $’7.7 million, a Pontormo over IJ5 million, a small Pica”o self-portrait $47 million, a large. mediocre and unfimshed Picasso, Les NoetJ d, Pi’TT’/Ie, In’ million, a van Gogh 153-9 million, and so on. Critics are lousy economic forecasters: none foresaw this inRation. But how· many auctioneers and de.le” did, in ’98” The Decline of the City of Mahagonny /21 ot even twenty years ago anyone, amateur or expert, could spend an hour or two in a museum without wondering what this Tiepolo, this Rembrandt, this de Kooning might cost at auction. Thanks to the unrelenting propaganda of the art market this is no longer quite the case, and the imagery of money has been so crudely riveted onto the face of museum· quality art by events outside the museum that its unhappy confusion between price and value may never be resolved. It is like the bind in the fairy tale: At the bottom of the meadow a treasure lies buried. It can be dug up-under one condition: that while digging, yOIl do not think of a white horse. Moreover, there are many areas in which American museums can no longer buy. (British museums are worse off: as a result of the malignant cultural policies of Margaret Thatcher, they cannot repair their own roofs.) They voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disenfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of two to five million dollars are turned to chickenfeed by art inflation. The symbol of the plight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an annual booklet that used to be titled Notable Acquisitions. In 1986 it was renamed Recent Acquisitions because, as the museum’s director wrote in its preface, the rise of art prices “has limited the quantity and quality of acquisitions to the point where we can no longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago.” And as the museum’s buying power fades, public experience of art is impoverished, and the brain drain of gifted young people from curatorship into art dealing accelerates. American museums have in fact been hit by a double whammy: art inflation and a punitive rewriting, in 1986, of U,S. tax laws, which destroyed most incentives for the rich to give art away. Tax exemption through donations was the basis on which American museums grew, and now it is all but gone, with predictably catastrophic results for the future. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them. The inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. New York’s position as art center of the West was based partly on the range, scholarship and aesthetic importance of its museum shows. And there is no question that the last fifteen years in the United States have been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a sequence of remarkable and, for this generation of museums and the public, definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of curatorial effort: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, van Gogh, 22/ INTRODUCTION Monet, Degas, W atteau,ColJrbet, Goya, Velazquez, Poussin-and, in 1989, the greatest Cubist show ever held, “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” at the Museum of Modern Art. Most of these transatlantic efforts, if not all, were seen in New York. This type of serious and argued show must be distinguished from the blockbuster that was so much a feature of American cultural life in the seventies. Nobody-or nobody responsible, anyway-believes anymore that great works of past art should be sent around the world for frivolous or merely political reasons. The blockbuster, that curse of American museology, began with two events: Andre Malraux’s loan of the Mona Lisa to the United States in 1963 (so that the world’s two famous ladies, Mona and Jackie, could be in the same room at the same time) and the appearance of Michelangelo’s Vatican Pieta at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow in 1964, looking like a replica of itself done in margarine, the viewers carried past it on a moving walkway. It produced, at its height, frenetic events like Tut and clunkers like the Metropolitan Museum’s 1983 Vatican show. It ended with that saturnalia of “heritage” nostalgia, “Treasure Houses of Great Britain,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1988.But the time of the blockbuster is gone; and it is no loss. Yet the loss, or even the winding down, of the great monographic exhibitions will prove very serious: and that is what the art market threatens. It is difficult for museums even to contemplate large retrospectives now, and the 1991 Seurat exhibition arranged for Chicago, New York, London and Paris may be remembered-if it comes off-as one of the last of its kind. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Van Gogh at Aries” was being planned in the early eighties, it was assigned a global insurance value of $1billion. Today it would be $S billion and the show could never be done. In the wake of the sale of Irises, every van Gogh owner wants to believe his or her painting is worth $50 million, and will not let it off the wall insured for less. So circulation is slowing down and the chances are that museums will again have to rely, as they did forty years ago, much more on their permanent collections than on temporary shows-with the difference that these collections too will be relatively static. What effect this will have on the American museum audience, conditioned to expect the ever-changing stimulus of new art events, remains to be seen. Certainly, the 1980s showed how the fear of contraction could lead institutions (notoriously, the Whitney Museum) to lower standards of curatorial judgment in the scramble for corporate underwriting arrd audience pull. The museum’s immersion in the art worId as a prom6tional The Decline of the City of Mahagonny / 23 system reduces its independence of taste; it chooses to mirror “what’s happening,” for fear that it might seem obsolete. It must take its cues from the market, the main determinant of New York’s visual culture in the eighties. But to invoke “what’s happening,” as though the museum were just a mirror, is an evasion. There are about 200,000 artists in the United States, each making (at a conservative guess) fifty or so objects a year. From the homeless prolet

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