A quiet crisis: is there a serious breakdown in the dialogue around contemporary painting? Should art critics get back into the business of making value judgments? - Issues & Commentary - painting and the past - Critical Essay

Art in America, March, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein

But classification, some might argue, is the only viable response to a pluralistic era, when there is no prevalent style or shared set of esthetic criteria. They'll say that we're in a replay of the 1970s when, as Peter Schjeldahl has recalled, criticism "became a matter of just keeping track of things, making taxonomical systems--all these artists who were sort of equally worthy and how do we keep them all in mind." (1) To which I would counter that in the 1970s there seems to have been plenty of vigorous critical dialogue in the pages of countless journals from The Fox to Art Rite and in the lofts and bars of SoHo. Furthermore, the pluralism of the 1970s transpired in an art world far less commercialized, capitalized and institutionalized than the one we live in now. Interestingly, Schjeldahl himself is troubled by current notions of pluralism. In a recent New Yorker review of a drawing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he noted, approvingly, that throughout the show "a viewer's powers of discrimination are called into play. Nothing could be further from the festivalist pluralism of so many contemporary group exhibitions (Documenta, the Whitney Biennial) that pat the darling tousled heads of all artists equally."

We're also beginning to see artists expressing a similar hunger for tougher critical distinctions. In the course of a recently published essay about his early career, Alex Katz pauses to blast the present moment: "Things started to unravel about 15 years ago. The pursuit of novelty has led to democracy in action which does not have anything at all to do with committed painting. Painting is not democratic. Some painters have more energy and skill than others. Some painters have more interested audiences. Discrimination is greatly diminished" (2) If Katz, whose fiat, style-conscious figuration informs so much current painting, is dismayed about the state of painting, things must be very bad indeed.

A prominent painter of a younger generation, John Currin, known for his blending of old-masterish technique and kitsch-ridden eroticism, appears to take an equally dim view of the state of painting. In the catalogue of the traveling European exhibition "Cher Peintre" [see p. 84], he tells an interviewer that: "most contemporary painting is terrible because the culture around it--apprenticeship, visual connoisseurship--is dead." I'm not a great fan of Currin's work (to my eye, Yuskavage, who's also taken with old masters and zaftig models, is a far more daring and accomplished painter), but I fully agree with him that painting is conditioned by several generations of deskilled students and from the resulting low expectations on the part of viewers. The medium exists in a kind of thronging void, where the breakdown of consensus has resulted not so much in liberation and experiment as in a kind of bazaar-effect, an artistic landscape populated by young painters drawing on all kinds of styles to produce what New York Times critic Holland Cotter has perfectly characterized as "well-schooled, craftsmanly busywork." (3) They have slight pictorial ambitions and little sense of what might constitute a powerfully innovative painting. But why should they bother with such complications? These days, it just takes a gallery full of attractive canvases with some pop-culture references and a soupcon of high-culture critique, and you're headed for the Whitney Biennial or a solo show at one of our proliferating contemporary-art museums.