"Everybody, you've got to get serious. Think about abstract values. These are what art is about. Modernism is the clue. Try and rethink the whole abandonment of it - abandon less of it. The jokes in Modernism - Surrealism, Pop - surely we've had enough of that now?
-Matthew Collings
Writing in his "Diary" column in the July/August issue of Modern Painters, Matthew Collings challenges a contemporary art scene that he calls more "flawed" than a reality which is deeply so with a strategy whereby all ideas are expunged, save those that are visual in nature. His cocktail napkin manifesto seeks to reclaim aesthetic meaning from the postmodern morass. As he puts it, "the whole idea of ideas in art is useless," thereby attacking the conceptual core of postmodernism. While my instinct is to oppose this sentiment on the basis of Cezanne and Picasso, among hundreds of others, in practical terms, I think he's on to something. There's a reality we must face -- especially those of us who love art and particularly painting -- most artists are no more insightful than your average Joe on Average Joe. The desire to make art in our time stems as much from the will to be short-tracked to celebrity as it does from the need to say something. Indeed, even when it does follow from the latter, the instances of genuine insight are so vanishingly rare that it would behoove us not to make this profession into a priesthood.
So an art that seeks first aesthetic values -- well at least that might lead us back to a situation where we have aesthetic values again. Whatever excesses it may have encouraged, modernism, as Collings recognizes, was a continuation of art history. Looking backwards, we can see that Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Goya were all asking the same questions as the moderns -- what is art, how does art convey its meaning, etc. And as we can see in their answers -- Vermeer's interest in producing work solely fixed on the representation of a particular quality of light, Rembrandt's removal of all extraneous information until his canvases are little more than his sitter's eyes -- they prized abstraction no less than a Kandinsky or a Mondrian.
But where do we find ourselves today? Telling the same worn-out joke that Duchamp first made when he proudly displayed his Fountain. Is it time for art to return to the values that provided it with an intrinsic meaning for centuries, or are we already too far down the road to an all-encompassing nihilism to bother ourselves with worrying about what art can be? Our age tells us that value judgments are ridiculous and then creates only a dearth of meaningful cultural product. Who among you believes we will spend even a moment agonizing over Joseph Beuys centuries from now? Septic systems of the 21st century have a better chance of gripping latter-day scholars than Beuys or Paul McCarthy does. At least they have an inherent value. While our culture has allowed itself to be duped by charlatans posing as artists, chances are future generations won't be similarly fooled by these cultural wolves in sheep's clothing. The fact that they claim to be artists will no longer demand the same respect that our sycophantic celebrity culture gives them.
Indeed, a return to the eternal questions presented in modernism -- both aesthetic and ethereal -- is the one thing needful for the contemporary art world to escape from its self-destructive intellectual narcissism. And where better to start than where Collings advocates: visual ideas.
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