Yesterday I received my Art in America for May 2007. It seems POMO is now viewed as the biggest challenge in the universities. Raphael Rubinstein sent out a questionaire to various powerbrokers in various institutions and they all seem to say the same thing. Post Modernism has failed and it's time to throw off the yoke. But they also all agree that the links between the institutions and the market place is a good thing. And why not? It's like the scene in High Anxiety where Dr. Richard Thorndyke standing in front of giant pictures of Freud, Rank, Jung, Adler and Dr. Joyce Brothers states in speech to his psychiatric peers..."Some of these great people...these giants behind me...gave us...a nice living."

Some of these folks say faculty and students must bond, form a consensus for a new art. The problem, as I see it, is that new art and new ideas about art have never come out of the universities. Not once - not ever. New art must come from the lived experience of the artists and the absolute burning desire to find a new voice. Institutions rely on precedent, they rely on the predictable and they rely on continuity. They used to teach technique, give a historical background and develop a need for theory in the student. Today, according to the article -the students are prepared to enter a profession and make...a nice living.

Innovation in the art world comes at the expense of all of the status quo. Picasso and Matisse were not part of the system. The system they faced would not let them be a part of it. Critics, those that made a nice living, published strings of articles championing the safe and staid and heaped scorn and derision on P&M's new works and ideas. Those in the institutions were protecting their reputations, their choices and their nice living. Pollock and DeKooning endured the hardships of the Depression and World War II - the academy at the time was cubist, realist, European - taught by the institutions and marketed in the galleries and auction houses. No one in the system wanted new ideas and the abstract expressionists suffered deprivation and castigation. Innovation in the art world has never been a top down model. It comes burbling up from the bottom, strange and unexpected - a black swan.

The institutional system when confronted by the inevitable - morphs into something else in a real CYA move - and all those that had been part of the before - if they hadn't obtained a level of real monetary influence- simply fall away. In the 40s it was a painter named Byron Browne - A man who dedicated his life to abstraction, to developing the European idea of Modernism here in the US. And when Abstract Expressionism won out the day through radical ideas and visions - his old fashioned work and his influence in the system - faded away. Even though he is written about as being part of the early Modernist movement with DeKooning and Gorky his work is not shown with them. Innovation changes everything. Innovation can not be controlled from the top as Postmodern institutions believe. It happens in our world - out here. It can't be taught, nor can it be indulged like some gift from the gods. You can not indulge artistic talent the way the institutions indulge business talent like CEOs or Presidents - installing the privileged into positions of influence. Real art is a different animal. Innovation happens out of pure poetic necessity - talent is one piece of the puzzle - but it's never enough - life imparts lessons that form personality, which in turn, forms innovation. That makes all the difference.

Recently there was an article by a Lt. Colonel Paul Yingling about the failure of institutions to plan for the situation in Iraq. It is a blistering critique of the Generalship that included among other things "....In "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife," John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency." This idea that the institutions deny the real world problems in favor of re-winning the historic battles already won is a Postmodern conceit. The avoidance of the problem is exemplified in the way Postmodernists mine the past in order to cloud the reality of today - it is how they retain power. Rather than learning and building on the past POMO demands that we must constantly relive it - like video game junkies rebooting for another go or watching endless Brady Bunch episodes on Nick or Alex Katz painting women from the equestrian classes. Postmodernism - once the clever spectacle of the 60s,70s and 80s - has metastasized into the insistent political handmaiden of institutional power and control. And as life in the Postmodern world has taught us - what we are told to believe is not necessarily what is.

Robert Storr's essay in the AIA article is right on point. "If you're anxious about the rise of authoritarianism - and who isn't - then buck it. Don't just talk back to it in another authority based language. Its time for post-postmodern generations to make up vocabularies and metaphors of their own - and teach them to their elders..." The rest of the essay is filled with good ideas and wise observations. I highly recommend you read it - carefully!

So as artists what are our responsibilities at this juncture? What are we to do when faced with overwhelming odds and power? How do we defeat the Postmodern enemy? And how do we do it under the pressure of having to make ...a nice living? I have devised my own way and I shall be writing about that shortly.