Several months ago, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD called “The Radware: A Not-All-That-Modest Proposal,” I suggested that conservatives should stop complaining about culture and do something about it: should create new institutions, starting with a museum. The museum’s curators would dazzle all comers with their verve and fresh thinking and sheer energy, and promise to give up the culture world’s number-one favorite hobby — rubbing the public’s nose in leftist platitudes — in exchange for something a little more constructive, like macrame. (We’d even provide the staff with self-help books on request. Stop Being a Leftist Ninny: Ten Easy Steps, etc.)
Of the many readers I heard from, most liked the idea (a few invited themselves to the opening). An actual new museum remains remote, but some discussion is taking place about a heterodox artand-history exhibit to be staged in New York. Even a single show is dauntingly expensive and complex to arrange, but stranger things have happened.
Some readers, however, objected, not only to that article but to other related ones. A number raised a point that is too important to ignore; that goes right to the heart of modern culture. THE WEEKLY STANDARD is a conservative magazine and I am supposedly a conservative critic. Where do I get the nerve to like abstract art? To celebrate a slash-and-burn abstractionist like de Kooning or a reformed Pop artist like Jasper Johns? There is such a thing as conservative art, these readers point out, and de Kooning, Johns, et al. are not it.
They are right. Conservative American art has been a welldefined proposition for most of this century; you see it in the thoughtful, often moody realism of a Bellows or Sloan, a Hopper or Burchfield or Wyeth. A bunch of realist painters are represented on the gallery scene today: Philip Pearlstine and Alex Katz are prominent examples. If you stop by the Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan you can see two recent paintings by the superb urban realist Richard Estes. They are warm and spacious and, at their best, give you the poignant sensation of seeing your own time and space from far away.
I have no intention of denigrating or “delegitimating” genuinely conservative art. It deserves to be defended. And the last thing we conservatives ought to pull is the “come off it, everyone knows abstract painting is good” maneuver. We are the movement that challenges orthodoxy. Look at classical music: The anti-melodic twelve-tone writing of Schonberg and his followers had immense prestige for much of the century and is widely admired still. And yet it is no good; is capable only of expressing violence (which is why the famous “Blut” scene in Berg’s Wozzeck is the only twelve-tone passage that is worth anything) and boring audiences to tears. The public was bound to come round and love it in the end — to the extent that, as they grow in wisdom and sophistication, migraine sufferers come to enjoy their headaches. Everyone knows abstract art is good, which proves nothing.
But for myself, the best abstract painting is so powerful and beautiful it commands attention. And my problems with “true conservative art” don’t end there. I have no principled objection, either, to the Establishment’s infatuation with “installations” as opposed to painting. An installation can be profound and sublime — look at the tense-and-perfect poise, the endless whispering depth of the best Zen gardens; the breathtaking silence of Luis Barragan’s Mexican courtyards. Nor can I object in principle to the fad for untraditional media. “Appropriation, much of it from the lowliest of sources, continues to inform much of this art, as does a heavy presence of words, printed or handwritten or scavenged” — so we were told at the legendarily awful 1993 Whitney Biennial. But Joseph Cornell glued together some of the century’s greatest art out of junk he picked up at dime stores, and his art is full of words. I can’t even complain about most artists’ being leftists; most artists have always been leftists. And my own paintings, for the record, would strike no serious person as “conservative” either. What are renegades like me doing in the conservative movement?
But we must be conservatives, because today’s liberal Establishment is no mere defender of freewheeling “anything goes” art versus conservative realism. “The art world, especially the segment of it corresponding to middle management in industry,” Arthur Danto wrote in 1992 — in the Nation! — ” is today a politicized, indeed an angrily politicized, group of persons.”
“Angrily” is a polite way of putting it. Yeats says this: “My mind, because the minds that I have loved,/The sort of beauty that I have approved,/Prosper but little, has dried up of late,/Yet knows that to be choked with hate/May well be of all evil chances chief.” Today’s mainstream art world is choked with hate. An art lover today has a moral duty to be against this Establishment.
Increasingly, the conservative intelligentsia is the intelligentsia. It is the place where love of art and learning and rational argument and country survives. It is the ark we climb aboard until the weather clears.
Grab an Establishment art magazine at random; here’s Artforum for September — you can buy it at the newsstand this afternoon. What’s up? Hmmm . . . a show by Dinos and Jake Chapman in which sexual organs are glued to the faces of plastic dolls, dolls are assembled into copulating ensembles, and so on. A painter named Kara Walker, whose subjects are “sodomy, rape, incest, mutilation, bestiality.” It is, Artforum helpfully explains, “garden- variety social dysfunction.” Damien Hirst’s pieces include chunks of dead animal floating in formaldehyde. The opening of Hirst’s show (at the prestigious Gagosian gallery in SoHo) was a big social event; the New Yorker wrote it up in “Talk of the Town.” (Artforum pans the exhibit: “But what comes next?” it asks plaintively.) In L.A., you might want to catch Lari Pittman,s show, featuring “gaping sphincters and vaginas” and various other images you don’t even want to read about. There is more, even in this one random issue, but you get the picture.
These artists are so proud of obscenity you’d think they invented it. Sorry, folks, the world has always been full of boors; it’s just that they never used to be quite so drawn as they are nowadays to art-world careers. In a recent news story about a gallery opening in New Orleans (a show called “Guns in the Hands of Artists”), the New York Times had the gall to begin like this: “This is not art that pleases the eye, here in this tiny gallery on Magazine Street.” How’s that again, art that doesn’t please the eye? In a gallery? This is the American art world, yours and your children’s, circa 1996: so creaky and corny, so hackneyed, so old, so tired.
A painting by Frank Moore I have discussed before in this space, on view at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, seems to me to capture the Establishment perfectly. It is called “Freedom to Share” and is based on a famous Thanksgiving illustration by Norman Rockwell, “Freedom from Want.” Moore’s version shows whites, blacks, and Asians round a festive table as Mother, who is white, presents a platter heaped up with drugs and syringes in the shape of a turkey. Hate is the medium; hate is the message. Is it art? Yes; bad art. Hate- filled art, hateful art, art that dirties the soul.
The art world’s problem goes beyond mere spite — although spite is a big part of it; a vicious circle of spite in which artists parade their angry contempt for the public, the public disdainfully ignores them, artists grow still angrier and more contemptuous. . . . But there is a “structural problem, ” also, that renders much of this world unable to deal seriously with the great art of the past. The Establishment is unanimous on the topic of feminism and tends (naturally) to go for the bitterest variety. And inconveniently, most great artists have been heterosexual men. Even worse, they have manifested a persistent interest in romance and eros and women, plus an annoying tendency to deal with those themes in their paintings, and it all puts feminists in a rotten mood. See for yourself. “It’s like any other nude. It’s a horizontal painting of a female lying naked.” (A staffer at the Museum of Modern Art, whose comments were included in a 1992 show in which museum personnel commented on paintings — in this case, by Modigliani.) “It’s just one more picture where the woman is naked and the men are clothed” (a painting by Magritte). Today’s Art Establishment swarms with feminists, who are of course entitled to their beliefs. Each one is like an orthodox Jew posted as food reviewer to the Annual Stuttgart Swinelest. It really doesn’t matter how sharp a critic you are; you’re disqualified.
“Now hold on a minute?” — the Establishment speaks up in self-defense. (Not that the art world reads THE WEEKLY STANDARD, but suppose it did.) ” Artists have always loved astonishing the bourgeoisie. That’s just the nature of art. Don’t get all huffy about it.”
Wrong. This misunderstanding is fundamental. Astonishing the bourgeoisie is indeed something artists and the art world have long enjoyed — as a hobby, for fun. But no first-rank artist’s reputation has ever rested on it. Today’s artists have made the ridiculous mistake of confusing this sideshow with the main act, like a violin virtuoso announcing that henceforth he will devote his career to rosining bows full-time. Matisse: “The mission of the artist is important enough for him to preoccupy himself only with his art.” Matisse again: “One can have liberal ideas, but the artist hasn’t the right to lose any of the precious time he has.” Hopper: Daumier “was great despite his political explications not because of them.” John Sloan: “While I am a Socialist, I never allowed social propaganda to get into my paintings.” The institutionalized prostitution of art to politics — invented by the twentieth century’s monster tyrannies and reenacted for your edification by the whining fools of 1990s Manhattan.
Yes, much work is shown nowadays that is not political and has nothing to do with the mainstream’s sick obsessions. The problem is that hate-art overwhelms the rest: If you stand by a babbling brook to enjoy nature and there is a baby screaming a few picnic blankets over, you might legitimately be told that there are lots of other sounds to listen to — the stream, the birds, the breeze. But hate-art colors the whole scene and makes you feel — whatever else is going on — sad and sick and low. That is exactly what it is intended to do.
So you see how it is: Today’s art establishment is fundamentally no good and needs to be replaced. To love beauty, truth, and art itself, to judge art without regard to the artist’s race or sex, to admire and defend high culture and teach it to your children — the Establishment hates those ideas.
Today’s conservative movement is mainly interested in politics, economics, and social issues, but must and will make the transition one day to an institution-building movement. Must and will face up squarely to its duty to rebuild culture from the ground up. It’s a wonderful opportunity, to be greeted with joy, a chance to throw open the windows on today’s stale, crushingly conformist scene where played-out, burnt-out leftist nostrums hang muzzily in the air like the stench of cigarette butts. But this ” institutional renaissance” business may easily look to true artistic conservatives like a hijacking, and they have reason to be unhappy. To such true conservatives I extend apologies and regrets, and promise to leave you and your realist paintings in peace as soon as the deluge is over.
By David Gelernter
