27 co n t em p orary v i s ual ar t + cult ure b roa d s hee t 4 2 .1 2 013
received both praise and scorn for her defence of male artists, whom she sees as embodiments of particular creative and libidinal urges. The book was swooned over by eminent writers and critics like Anthony Burgess and Harold Bloom, and its erudition is everywhere to see. But already Paglia showed an aptitude for the quick swipe germane to editorialising. Critics who do not meet with her sympathies can be abruptly dealt with, and she was also prone to fall under the spell of her own brilliance. In her subsequent journalistic career as self-styled public intellectual, Paglia again alienated many women by describing what she felt were feminism’s negative effects. One of them was to have robbed boys of appropriate role models, since the macho star and the superhero were now relegated to a suspect place of male aggression. Bereft of such stereotypes, boys were apt to waver in guilt and indecision. This point was, again, partly true but since she began writing there was never a stemmed flow of action heroes or types; action men continued to be sold in shops and models of powerful male heterosexuality have never been in short supply in popular culture. Nonetheless, the shrill note she sounds about the doldrums of the art world seems to be a sign of the times. Only a week after her article appeared, The Observer reported Dave Hickey’s public statement of disenchantment with the art world. For him, art had become a subsidiary of the hedge fund business; the critic had begun to resemble a “courtier class”, advising the rich on acquisitions; and “works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn are the result of ‘too much fame, too much success and too little critical sifting’ and are ‘greatly overrated’”.1 This is probably true, but it is open to debate as to whether such artists are representative of the many, to which there are two answers. They are inasmuch as they are the artists that are collected and which garner the most attention. The other answer is that they are not, and that there are thousands of artists and critics in continental Europe, in China and wherever else who have next to no interest in them. But with commentators as varied, as experienced and as influential as Paglia and Hickey expressing anger and disappointment at contemporary art, we might say it is a striking coincidence, a real problem, or we might ask for more detail. Contemporary art, or some contemporary art, the art in their sights, might be specious and dispiriting, but what are the qualities that it needs? Hickey is well known for his defence of beauty, while Paglia blames the diminution of artistic quality on the “expansion of form” and the “contraction of ideology”. The former is put down to “the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and 1970s”, while the latter is blamed on artists having lost touch with their audience. Artists are in an enclave of “upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism
of the 1960s”. Awash with emotive adjectives (“brash”, “fiery”), Paglia conveniently misses the fact that it was precisely this antiestablishment attitude that brought about the “multimedia revolution” that “dethroned painting”. And yet painting has not been dethroned, mainly for the fact that it is the mainstay for upper class liberals to park their money. It is worth parsing Paglia not because it is of any significant merit, but precisely because it is a graphic reflection of the kind of misleading posturing that diverts from the central issues. She bemoans the death of the avant-garde, which she sees as occurring because of her “hero” Andy Warhol. The death of the avant-garde is certainly ascribable to the weakening of ideology, but it is a common error to place the blame on art. Indeed, Paglia’s diatribe is a symptom of a problem that has existed since the demise of the avant-garde, which is to make art a straw man for much wider social conditions that it itself reflects. Art is by no means to blame for the loss of faith in revolution and the quizzical attitude to change besetting politics. In art as well as politics, there is no longer a positive, or plausible ‘outside’ that poses as an alternative to the status quo. The contemporary political condition, as mirrored by the condition of art and culture, is one of constant alteration, slippage but no change. In the summer of 2011 the Islamists in Egypt smothered the emancipatory potential of their revolution; Occupy Wall Street did nothing in effect, and so on. Don’t blame art. In a recent book that riffs on Jameson’s classic commentaries on Postmodernism, Post-Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of just-in-time capitalism, Jeffrey Nealon makes the point that: Under postmodernism and post-postmodernism, the collapse of the economic and cultural that Adorno sees dimly on the horizon has decisively arrived (cue Baudrillard’s Simulations—where reality isn’t becoming indistinguishable from the movies; it has become indistinguishable) we arrive at that postmodern place where economic production is cultural production and vice versa. And I take that historical and theoretical axiom to be the (largely unmet and continuing) provocation of Jameson’s work: if ideology critique depends on a cultural outside to the dominant economic logistics, where does cultural critique go now that there is no such outside, no dependable measuring stick to celebrate a work’s resistance or to denounce its ideological complicity?2 It appears that Paglia may have taken on a much bigger issue than she may have thought. But it is important to recall that the title of her article is ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’. In fact, Paglia is not hankering after an avantgarde but rather the opposite. In an abstract and unsupported flourish, she claims that the better creative work is being done in the field of industrial design whose products are shorn of “ideology and cant”. This sounds absurd given her previous comment that art suffered from too little ideology. But there is still a percentage of truth in this.