ART is in bad shape. Advanced art, that is. The diagnosis: condition feeble. The prognosis: poor. The avant-garde has finally run out of steam, whether in Munich or Los Angeles, Paris or New York; the turnover of styles and theories that gave the 1960s their racketing ebullience (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Op, Pop and so on) has been followed by a sluggish descent into entropy. There seems to be no escape from that spiral.
Dealers continue to exhibit their pet trends as though nothing had happened, but recent art criticism has taken on a glum, apocalyptic tone: "The art currently filling the museums and galleries is of such low quality generally that no real critical intelligence could possibly feel challenged to analyze it...There is an inescapable sense among artists and critics that we are at the end of our rope, culturally speaking."
The writer is not some reactionary fogy whose predictions have finally come true, the way a stopped clock is right twice a day. She is a leading modernist critic, Barbara Rose, and her strictures would not have been made in the '60s, when American art seemed to inhabit an endless summer. Then New York believed in its manifest destiny; it had become the new Paris, or even Imperial Rome. The "mainstream" ran through New York. And it seemed by mid-decade that virtually everyone with something to invest was blundering about in its turbid flood like a shark, snapping up artworks. The culmination of this process was "Henry's show," a huge and partial exhibition called "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" that Henry Geldzahler organized at the Metropolitan. If ever an exhibition broke the back of a decade, it was this one. It declared the union of new art, capital and official power to be indissoluble, and crystallized the dissatisfactions that many artists felt with the interlocking, market-based System. It seemed to proclaim the end of an era.
The era was of great significance. It still seems true that American painting and sculpture during those 30 years reached a level of quality and invention that it never had before and may not soon regain. But creative periods do not last forever, and the desire to invent does not guarantee them. By 1970, few serious artists were untroubled by the exploitation of art. And one remedy that was proposed with increasing frequency was the abolition of the art object itself—anything that could be bought or possessed. This was not a new idea. Unfortunately, when used as a principle of art activity, it caused an eddy—even a vacuum—in which the avant-garde is immobilized today.
"Advanced" art—whether conceptual art, process art, video, body art or any of their proliferating hybrids—avoids the object like the plague. The public has retreated, in turn, from it. This is a worldwide phenomenon, and what now exists is not simply a recession of interest (and talent) but a general weariness—a reluctance to believe in the avant-garde as principle. To be ahead of the game now seems pointless, for the game—under its present rules—is not worth playing.