(10 of 10)
By then (or so one must surmise, through the haze of fin de siecle uncertainties) the whole picture of American art in the '80s will have altered; some popular reputations will seem as obviously ridiculous -- though as sociologically interesting -- as the former cult of such late 19th century artists as Bougereau or Hans Makart. But whether there is any real genius in the offing is a moot point. America has no major younger expressionist artist, like Germany's Anselm Kiefer or England's Frank Auerbach. Though it has some gifted realist painters, notably William Bailey and Neil Welliver, none can be said to compare, in point of intensity and unsparing intelligence, with England's Lucien Freud or Spain's Antonio Lopez Garcia.
The problem is not merely that the upper middle class's voracious enthusiasm for art of almost any kind "coincides" with the inflation of minor talents into major ones, of mere promise into claims on art history. It is that the one has produced the other. In the process, too many painters have been left without a middle ground between the miseries of oblivion and the stresses of cultural stardom. Hence fame depends, to a grotesque and absurd extent, on painters' ability to excite envy among their rivals, and the sense of common reciprocity that pervaded the art world up to ten years ago is drying out. Where it still exists, it is more to be found west of the Hudson, in Houston or Chicago or San Francisco, than in Manhattan itself. The moral economy of the art world has been so distorted by hype and premature careerism that a serious artist in New York must now face the same unreality and weightlessness as a serious actor in Los Angeles.
It is as though the conditions that produce great art -- patience, internalization, ruthless self-criticism and an engagement with the authoritative past that goes deeper than the mere ransacking of one's culture for quotable motifs -- have been bleached out of current painting by the glare of its own success. And this success depends as much on the eager passivity of consumers as on the opportunism to which America, besotted with cultural therapy, consigns its talents. No culture needs a hegemony to produce its quota of strong artists; such people do continue to emerge in the U.S. But there is no doubt that the American dominance in world painting that seemed a fact of life 20 years ago is finished, and no effort of marketing can revive it.
FOOTNOTE: *Reprinted by permission of Robert Graves.