Artists, Gallerists and Critics are abuzz about the New Criterion article on the state of the art world by Roger Kimball entitled "Why the Art World is a Disaster." There is the usual Left and Right arguments going on about craft, quality vs. idea, concept etc etc, but what remains unexamined is the culture at large. Those on the Left are complaining that the arguments put forth by Kimball are reactionary drivel, equating his essay as a call for a return to 19th century aesthetics. Those on the Right are using the argument that a New academy rules the roost. I think both arguments are right. In our culture we are living in age proliferated by this new art academy based on Postmodernist tenets. There can be no denying that sameness of practice, look and theory predominate the work of most every gallery, fair, biennial and show that we see. POMO is the art wave of our times (we've discussed this at length throughout our blog.)

Kimball writes, "Ms. Hessel once enthusiastically recalled her introduction to contemporary art as a young woman in Munich: “It was like entering a cult group.” That cult has long since become the new Salon where the canons of accepted taste are enforced with a rigidity that would have made Bouguereau jealous. The only difference is that instead of a pedantic mastery of perspective and modeling we have a pedantic mastery of all the accepted attitudes about race, class, sex, and politics. Since skill is no longer necessary to practice art successfully, the only things left are 1) appropriate subject matter (paradoxically, the more inappropriate the better) and 2) the right politics.

Subject matter is neither here nor there - and in the end it's not what makes an art work exciting or interesting. I don't get upset about viewing intimate naughtiness or private parts, nor do I get upset about politics. What does upset me is how it's all done. I really don't know how some of the critics manage to separate it all out. One video installation in a dark room pretty much looks like every other video installation in a dark room. Most painting and sculpture is collage driven and installed as "extended field" projects on billboard style painting grounds or across the floor of a white cube. Abstraction is in the theoretical basement of culture at the moment having totally capitulated any intellectual standing to POMO's all encompassing mannerism. Postmodernism's academic influence is complete, total and overwhelming. To top it all off - packaging has replaced skill as the preferred form of presentation all across the art world spectrum. All forms of art are now processed rather than made. Artists hire specialists to paint their paintings, make their sculptures, print their digital photos. Very few POMO artists actually practice their trade, though most all of them make a show of presenting it.

The idea of a visual theoretics is now defunct in this academic art world. If you want to explore ideas about the mechanics behind how we see or process our visual experiences people turn off immediately. They don't want the hard work of understanding. They don't want to get all heated up. Better a cooler art that plays to their sensibilities and understanding. We live in an age of shortsightedness and myopia. Most of my generation can not sit through a Hitchcock film - too few words, too many visual clues, not enough context. This sort of visual amputation is rampant in the art world today. Visual imperatives are not discussed and we do not think in visual terms. Oh we're great at optical noise, but visual meaning and understanding happens outside the work. We must have a seeing eye dog of text in order to come to an understanding with the work in front of us. The museums are the worst offenders of this practice with wall cards now as long as an a la carte menu. Additionally a generation of painters have relinquished the idea of actually introducing meaning into their work. The intellectual ground that should drive the meaning and process of the work has been abandoned to the hip narratives whipped up through the subjective experiences of every peeping Tom, Dick & Harry. "Well what do you see?"...or "What do you think it means?" has no business in art theoretics. It is the job of the artist to accept responsibility for the aesthetic choices they make and be very clear about what they are doing. An artist paints a certain way because she has determined that this way was the only way to get her idea across. Double dealing intellectual laziness will no longer suffice. As an artist you should be VERY clear about what it is that your doing. Stella took a critic to task for saying that he painted pinstripes - he was determined to differentiate his process - he painted the stripe not the spaces between. It was a concise philosophic idea at a time when Modernist abstract painting was fighting its last great battles over pictorial space. In this endgame Stella was determined to make a huge distinction. What I'm getting at is visual responsibility.

This means some hard truths must be faced. Designing an artwork is not the same as making one. Process is more important to the impact of a visual idea than the subject matter depicted. Guernica is great because Picasso painted it as he painted - not in someone else's style. Matisse's Blue Nude is great because he painted it using techniques he developed from his own hard understanding of painting itself. Dekooning, Pollock, Stella the list is endless - all painted in the face of history trying to find a new expression. How you do it determines the ultimate meaning of the work, otherwise you are designing, not making, Art. Most everything about our POMO culture asks us to mine the past instead of build on it. We collage everything - music, photos, texts, movies, laws, contracts, relationships, politics, wars, economics, history etc etc - consuming culture while avoiding actually making it. Maybe it has come time to reinvent the wheel.