Co-opting the arts

Despite this liberatory tone, their selection of "so-called celebrity" subjects (their term) and defense of this strategy in our celebrity-obsessed culture reveals a rather conventional approach: "Our choice of artists and their works is not construed as a way of admiring their exemplary [artistic] courage; rather, it shows the many cracks in the community of the avant-garde." Their (dubious) rationale for not including female artists--apart from Jeanne-Claude, whose collaboration with Christo began after the artist's development of the privately funded modus operandi that interests the authors--is based on women's economic marginalization. Frankly, I would have been more interested in Barbara Kruger's dance between economic success and "critical detachment"--one of Sassower and Cicotello's prescriptions for avant-gardism--than J.S.G. Boggs's performative output. Given their insistence on public accessibility, a reader might also have expected a more radical interpretation of this concept than Warhol's production of multiples, or even Haring's Pop Shop, whose negative impact on his North American career they vastly underestimate. What about the work of artists like Rachel Whiteread or Tom Otterness, who create both "private" and "public" art? Sassower and Cicotello seem to tacitly accept the commercial/institutional system as an arbiter of value, that is, the creator of a canon.

Too much of this unillustrated book is based on the debunking of pre- and postwar philosophers and art writers--ranging from Hilton Kramer, Clement Greenberg and Donald Kuspit to Renato Poggioli Roland Barthes and Arthur Danto--who often function only as straw men to be obliterated. The authors' art-historical interpretations can sometimes seem questionable and so tailored to their arguments that a glossary of definitions might help. Magritte is an avant-gardist, for instance, while the pessimism of Ernst and Giacometti, and the utopianism(!) of Dali, exclude them from the club. To cite one of many other peculiarities, the authors repeatedly assert that blending "high and low" is a key avant-garde characteristic, then tangentially observe in a discussion of Duchamp's readymades that "Judy Chicago's banquet table with its specially designed dinner plates has been promoted to the level of an artwork by galleries and museums." (When contemplating The Dinner Party [1979], Duchamp's readymades aren't the forebears of Chicago and company's handcrafted extravaganza that first come to mind.) In short, this book often reads too much like the authors' team-taught esthetics seminar from which it emerged and too little like a vehicle for critical reappraisal or even, and I hesitate to use the term, social change. But isn't such imaginative rethinking the point, after all, of theoretical writing?

Robert Atkins is the author of ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements and Buzzwords (1991/97) and its "prequel," ArtSpoke (1993), both from Abbeville Press.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group