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Because its artists draw badly and compose worse, they simply doodle until the canvas is full, making wacky parodies of "all-over" composition. They like space-cadet imagery, sieved through childhood memories of the tail-finned and Lurexed '50s. They are chirpy and cheery, or woozily pseudoromantic; or, if neither of these, then vacantly tough. Their work is all pose and no position. Thus, from Kenny Scharf's mural of Silly Putty aliens in a galactic landscape of squiggles and David Wojnarowicz's repulsive Attack of the Alien Minds, through the visual fatuities of Rodney Alan Greenblat and Jedd Garet, the biennial celebrated what its curators evidently took to be the mood of the moment: glitz, camp, childishness and art as fashion, served up with the usual parsley about "renewals" and "advances." This gunk is not even kitsch. And behind it lie untapped reserves of worse gunk, for thanks to universal art education and the American worship of creativity in the young, all gunk is a renewable resource.
Bad art isn't what it used to be, but what is it doing in a museum? Why does such aesthetic entropy pervade the biggest sales boom for "hot" new painting in American history?
There are several reasons, which interlock. One was the postwar baby boom, whose mass, having moved through the art schools like an antelope through a python, arrived in the art world at the end of the '70s. American art teaching swelled in the '60s and '70s. Every university had to have its art department, and that department had to be full. The National Association of Schools of Art and Design guesses that about 900 institutions offer fine-arts degree programs; its own 138 member schools had 45,000 students in the fall of 1982, of whom some 8,500 graduated with B.F.A. degrees in the spring of '83. So the annual output of all American art schools is probably around 35,000 graduates. Significantly, no one seems to know the exact figures entailed in this unprecedented glut of artists.
The impact of the '60s and '70s on American art training has yet to be fully assessed, and when it is, the results will not be reassuring. They will show a pattern of indifferent teachers (painters doing it for survival) serving institutions that, for fear of a drop in enrollments, disliked failing anyone and were none too picky about the students' motives for being there in the first place.
Two pieties lay behind the softening. The first was a pseudotherapeutic regard for the "individuality" of tyros; the second, a distrust of "academic" practices, since these were what modernism had "overthrown." High on playpen radicalism, the '60s brought a massacre of plaster casts and a general winding down of life drawing in most, though not all, American schools. Yet it is obvious by now that all the great draftsmen of the modernist era, from Seurat to Picasso, from Beckmann to De Kooning, were grounded in academic processes and could no more have done without them than a plane can do without a landing strip. Hence the paradox: a figurative revival partly spearheaded by the poorest generation of draftsmen in American history.