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So the art world is overcrowded, and overcrowding means competition. It reaches extremes in Manhattan, where perhaps 90,000 artists live and work, providing the art-dealing system with a large proletariat from which trends can be condensed at will. But the struggle for visibility is intense from Maine to Albuquerque, and careerism, once a guilty secret, has become one of the art world's main texts. We have at last reached the state of mind envisioned by Samuel Butler more than 100 years ago in Erewhon, where students are examined in the prices fetched by leading pictures of the previous 50 or 100 years, because the artist "is a dealer in pictures, and it is as important for him to learn how to adapt his wares to the market . . . as it is for him to be able to paint the picture." How many students today would even recognize this as satire?
There has never been such an inflated market for hot, young and new American art -- or, because of the short attention span of many collectors, such a labile one. Thus, young artists are less disposed to accept any ideal of slow maturation. This makes them unusually vulnerable to fashion and prone to seize whatever eye-catching stylistic device they can, no matter how sterile it may be in the long run. It also gets them stuck in typified gestures. But by then, with luck, they have hit.
There are many careers of this sort. Among their prototypes is the former subway artist and present disco decorator Keith Haring, 27, with his thin doodles of barking dogs and radioactive babies. Another is Jean-Michel Basquiat, 24, much hyped as a sort of art-world Eddie Murphy and hence especially popular with Los Angeles collectors, his untutored and zappy scrawls routinely praised for their "energy." (This anxious hope for signs of energy is a sure index of cultural flabbiness.) But for postgraffiti art the writing is already on the wall, and such careers, rolling in their limos to oblivion, remind one of Robert Graves' Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist:
He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid,
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.*
Fashion, however, is what the audience has on its mind, along with myths of past glory. The new mass public for art has been raised on distorted legends of heroic modernism: the myth of the artist as demiurge, from Vincent van Gogh to Jackson Pollock. Its expectations have been buoyed by 20 years of self- fulfilling gush about art investment. It would like live heroes as well. But it wants them to be like heroes on TV, fetishized, plentiful and acquiescent. If Pollock was John Wayne, the likes of Haring 'n' Basquiat resemble those two what's-their-names on Miami Vice: cute cops, a designer avant-garde whose "newness" has all the significance of a goat-cheese pizza.
Americans once tended to treat high art as a refuge from mass culture. Let Hollywood exude whatever schlock it wanted; let the Box leak its eight hours of imagery a day into the average viewer's skull -- there would always be the Manet or the Rothko in the museum to reorient the distracted eye. The demands (and rewards) of painting were one thing, those of mass media another.