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It was an exhilarating experience. But inevitably, within a few years a new church was established. Says Artist Saul Steinberg: "This church has its saints, who are accepted only after they are dead. We have the holy bones of Mondriaan and the miraculous blood of Soutine. This church has its martyrs, like Jackson Pollock. It has its bishops and cardinals—the critics and museum directors. The museums have encouraged the production of icons, holy images, and other good luck charms that have no artistic value outside the church." The church also has its missionaries—the dealers. Among the leading ones right now is Manhattan's Leo Castelli. A few years ago, the story goes, Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning remarked, "That son of a bitch Castelli, he has the nerve to sell anything. He could even sell beer cans." Whereupon Jasper Johns proceeded to create his famous pop-art beer cans. Since the emergence of pop, with its move back to representation, abstraction has ceased to be the absolute dogma of the artistic church, whose chief theology today is the "reality theory."
This theory of art as an object turns every object into potential art. As one philosopher, Columbia Professor Arthur C. Danto, admits: "What in the end makes Rauschenberg's real beds streaked with paint and Warhol's Brillo boxes art is the theory. Without the theory, one is unlikely to see them as art." This does not satisfy all the critics. Says the Observer's Nigel Gosling: "Take a table and put it into a gallery, then it's art. But take eight of them and put them into a gallery, then it's a restaurant."
What then is art? The modern sages offer no solid answers. Says Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art: "It is an expression of individual sensibilities. A neon Coca-Cola sign is in a very real sense a piece of art. The fact that anyone could make it is more or less beside the point. The fact is that no one else did make it." Says the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred Barr, who is viewed by many as the untiaraed pope of the modern art world: "It is folly to say what is art. Works can become art by fiat —sometimes the fiat of one man. And it can be art for a while and then not art. It's obvious today that comics are art. Just because these things are vulgar, doesn't mean they are not art." Says the former director of the Tate Gallery, Sir John Rothenstein: "Art derives from the intention of the artist. But time is the only impeccable judge."
The necessity for considering the artist's intent and personality is the only common note that modern opinion strikes. It is a doctrine that brings art criticism down to the plane of psychoanalysis. The principle was perhaps pushed to its extreme by Peegy Guggenheim, who has admitted that she was not much impressed by Jackson Pollock as a painter until the day he urinated in her fireplace.
Meaning in Meaninglessness