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Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2006 by Nancy J. Troy, Geoffrey Batchen, Amelia Jones, Pamela M. Lee, Romy Golan, Robert Storr, Jodi Hauptman, Dario Gamboni
But Buchloh's deepening reservations about the spectacular character of so much contemporary art (here, the worst offenders are the likes of Bill Viola) inflect a parallel conversation about the teaching of early-twentieth-century modernism. By way of anecdote: over the last several years, I have heard colleagues speak to a marked shift in the field from the prewar to the postwar avant-garde, signaled at once by the opening of academic lines dedicated to "postwar and contemporary" scholars in departments of art history and the growing list of dissertation topics about recent art (by "recent," I refer not only to that of the 1960s or 1970s--not even of the 1980s, for that matter--but also to work that has emerged in the last ten or so years). A number of reasons account for this change. One can't dismiss the influence of the October editors themselves in shaping the research agendas of their students (I include myself among many in this regard), nor the sense that some of the more canonical material may be reaching the point of critical exhaustion. Likewise, one can't discount the inevitable passage into historicity that the study of art from the 1970s or 1980s represents: the lengthening reception history of work from this period has enabled more productive and serious scholarship. For better or for worse, the 1960s may have replaced the postwar era of Abstract Expressionism as the immediate point of art historical reference for a new generation of students.
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The flip side of this picture, however, speaks to the authors' worries about the expansion of the aesthetic into the spaces of everyday life, the endless stream of highly designed and mediated experiences that announces the "negative teleology" instantiated by postwar corporate culture. Again anecdotally: some have suggested that undergraduates are less inclined to study the early avant-garde on the one hand, because of the historical amnesia encouraged at all levels of the culture and, on the other, because of the spectacular seductions of so much contemporary art itself: its uncomplicated dalliances with fashion and entertainment and the emergence of glamorous "destination" art museums (such as the various Guggenheims around the world and the Tate) that sponsor such work. As a consequence, the teaching of contemporary art in the university is fraught by no small amount of ambivalence. The question we need to ask, then, is: In what ways is contemporary art's ostensible institutionalization by the discipline complicit with the very mechanisms the best work seeks to interrogate?
It is the predicament of contemporary art history that makes Art since 1900 such a critical tool for the study of earlier avant-gardes. Far from the flip claim that the volume merely consolidates its authors' institutional standing, its broad coverage of recent art underscores the unfinished business of teaching modernism in the academy, the importance of which Krauss calls the "continuance of modernism." While the concluding round table makes plain the enormity of the task, Art since 1900 stands as an uncompromisingly rigorous monument to that effort. As Yve-Alain Bois speculates hopefully about the book at its conclusion (p. 679): "who knows ... perhaps it might have some liberatory effect."
