Great Art for a New Time: Treatise on Art in 3 Parts, Part 1

Life is not worth taking seriously when there is no serious, public discussion of the difference between a good and a bad life (and the role of art and culture in both). Society no longer needs an artistic avant-garde, but an ethical and existential avant-garde, and unless artists join it, and show themselves to be the visionaries in its forefront, art will become more humanly irrelevant than it already is.
Donald Kuspit, Avant-Garde, Hollywood, Depression: The Collapse of High Art (2000) (1)

Great Art is an artistic creation that seizes something universally fundamental in a human being, acting like a portal through which the light of inspiration travels from artist to viewer, illuminating glimpses of the extraordinary consciousness we are all capable of. It is an art that communicates relevance both in its current environment and through the changing currents in time. It is an art that expresses itself through varying levels of communication by accessible aesthetics, by intellectual stimulation and by more subtle realms of profundity and inexplicable inspiration, reaching out to the novice viewer and academic alike, speaking in a language that each can understand.

Through the development of the avant-garde, there was an imperative break with dogmatic art and theory and through the subsequent incarnations of avant-garde ideologies, a rich and complex fabric has been woven that reflects the historically exponential unfolding of the global society and human consciousness. Yet, despite it’s best attempt to maintain objective perspective, the avant-garde, currently incarnated as Minimalism and Conceptualism, has exhausted itself on the hamster wheel of tautology, losing contact with the very proletariat it historically claimed to speak to. Art now stands at a unique historical vantage point like never before, informed through experienced historical prowess in an atmosphere charged with the electricity of potential. Armed with the arsenal of the past 150 years of artistic innovation, art must stride ahead into a new and heightened relevance to the global society, striving without fear for a Great Art once again.

The avant-garde was born from the revolutionary current pervading European society in the middle of the nineteenth century and embodied unorthodox methodologies that sought to slice open the soft underbelly of established academia. The cultural climate was such that this attack was not only warranted but necessary in attempting to understand or simply come to terms with massive social upheavals of the fast changing and chaotic world. Suddenly, any “greater” or “higher” themed art was irrelevant as a jaded populace struggled to find their place in this new reality, seeking something that spoke to their current condition rather than to a seemingly out-of-touch tradition. Originating from this revolutionary idealism, the avant-garde slowly began to symbolically epitomize the “anti-“ movement, anti- whatever it was that seemed to be the accepted institution at present. Avant-gardism became an over-arching idea, with its definitions and participants changing as culture and ideas evolved, calling themselves new and better than their previous counterparts.

With the speeding up of culture, the development in sciences and technologies bounding ahead at an ever increasing rate, the rapid sprint forward and subsequent adjustment period left many reeling in the dizzying race toward an imperceptible end. Acting as the cultural litmus test and reflecting the affected sentiments of an ever more confused public, the artist increasingly looked inward, only to find the same confusion and unsettlement as he found when he outwardly critiqued the engulfing Western Mind’s insatiable and feverish consumption of the next fix. As Stuart Davis almost prophetically wrote in 1935:
The artist today is in a state of confusion, doubt and struggle. He is not alone in his plight but has the respectable company of business men, chambers of commerce, politicians, congresses, presidents, and supreme courts. In short, the artist participates in the world crisis. (2)

The sense of isolationist bourgeois ennui deepened as society watched what happened when it got involved, when it cared, and how nothing occurred but further let-downs and disappointments, which served only to further its habitually pathological coping mechanisms of mistrust and disinterest. It’s as if this sentiment that had been a powerful underground current through the first half of the 20th century, bubbled to the surface in Andy Warhol himself. This is best depicted in his disaster and death paintings, a glaring critique of America’s fast track to over-stimulation of frenzied spectacle, commenting on both the desire to flirt with impermanence and mortality and the languid detachability with which they can be viewed when held at arm’s length.
Art maintained its cynicism through the induced utopian idealism of the 60’s, had it’s revelries in white powdered nihilism in the 70’s, staggered through the subsequent hangover in the 80’s, then just began to look bleary-eyed at the world around it throughout the 90’s, when it was hit square in the head with a global-sized reality check called 9/11. Having the wind knocked out of it, art hasn’t had the courage to stand back up and a whole new world has erupted while it was down: a globally conscious world that is systematically peeling away the layers of disillusionment as the downfalls of capitalism and our global market debacles are becoming more and more apparent. Where even a few years ago capitalism and democracy were being touted by most as the giant band-aid that would heal every society, the absurdity of this notion is growing undeniably self-evident as more international markets, trade structures and entire societies are experiencing a serious bottoming out as the house of cards built by international mega-corporations is having the rug pulled from underneath it, causing a reverberation in global politics that has yet to completely come to fruition. Where is art in all of this? Still uncomfortably lying on the ground, unsure of what to do next.

With an institutionalized avant-garde, supported by its own institutionalized market economy, it is easy to see why there is little deviation from the accepted “unorthodoxy.” The avant-garde once claimed to speak to society, to reference society itself as the duplicitous amalgamation of ideas and influences that make it so, indeed, claimed many times to be the true art of the people. But the effect over the decades was only a severe and systematic hollowing out of meaning that lost the interest of those it was trying to represent and now is left to pander sheepishly to its own theoretical academia. Postmodernism has created a vacuum, a void of subjectivity that it has misguidedly filled with a purely theoretical infusion, fracturing and objectifying material into ever vaguer ideas that serve only to reassert the helpless uncertainty plaguing creativity and intimidating individuality. Confusing theory with meaning, existence itself has been trivialized and a poorly disguised inauthenticity is rampant in both the artist and society.(3)

Classic Dada sentiments could very well be applied to today’s art and global political regime as there is a rising disgust “with the false prophets who are nothing but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease. . . disgust with the lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws.”(4) But unlike Dada and so many of the other artistic movements that have shaped our aesthetic and intellectual leanings over the years, our symptomatic disinterest can no longer characterize our worldview.

Humankind has gotten away with it for so long because there were no immediate repercussions from our actions. However, it seems with each passing year, as global climate is more violent and unpredictable, as political regimes exert their power with greater atrocities, and as colonialism is the wolf under the sheepskin of globalization, there seems to be more of a pervading sense that the time to pay the piper is almost at hand. Our global society, in fact, the very Earth we inhabit cannot withstand more disinterest.