The New Philistines: (Provocations)
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Last annotated on March 18, 2017
Leo Tolstoy railed against the ‘perversion’ of art in his day.Read more at location 23
art in the late nineteenth century still sought after beauty and truth.Read more at location 27
Modernist art promoted radical ideas about what counts as beautiful and about how to convey truth, and it rebelled violently against old aesthetic and moral standards. But the modernists felt acutely the weight of those standards.Read more at location 28
By contrast, today’s art world isn’t even contemptuous of old standards – it is wholly indifferent to them. The word ‘beauty’ isn’t part of its lexicon.Read more at location 31
a set of all-purpose formulas about race, gender, class and sexuality, on one hand, and power and privilege, on the other. Contemporary art is obsessed with articulating those formulas in novel ways.Read more at location 37
I was born and raised in Iran, one of the world’s least-free societies,Read more at location 54
as the American critic Camille Paglia has written, artists today ‘are too often addressing other artists and the in-group of hip cognoscenti’.Read more at location 61
contemporary identitarian art rejects the very possibility of objective, universally accessible beauty and truth.Read more at location 69
I believe, after the great art historian and populariser E. H. Gombrich, that ‘it is possible to achieve artistic perfection within any style’.Read more at location 76
What I long for is art – in any medium or style – that reflects formal rigour and intellect along with genuine mystery and individuality.Read more at location 77
Founded in 1962, Artforum is the leading US contemporary arts magazine and the intellectual home of America’s tenured avant-garde.Read more at location 260
Identity politics is the lens through which the magazine views not just what happens in the arts, but in the world at large.Read more at location 264
Queer theory grew out of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) and the academic feminism of the 1980s and ’90s. Today it reigns supreme over the humanities. Queer theorists hold that identity, and especially gender and sexual identity, is a kind of performance.Read more at location 266
structures that regulate modern life, chief among them language, provide the scripts for those performances. Queer theory calls for resistance to those scripts and their stock characters, such as male/female, gay/straight and so on.Read more at location 268
‘Queer’ is as much an identity as an activity aimed at disrupting stable identity.Read more at location 270
To ‘queer art’ means to disavow aesthetic achievement as a primary aim of the artist.Read more at location 273
‘Beauty’ is whatever those in power – straight, wealthy white men, basically – say it is.Read more at location 277
‘To judge a work on its aesthetic merit is to buy into some discredited, fusty hierarchy, tainted with sexism, racism, colonialism and class privilege.’Read more at location 279
The identitarians of Artforum, however, see themselves pursuing social justice,Read more at location 285
‘I am a model minority,’ wrote the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Michelle Kuo, in her editorial statement introducing the identity politics issue.Read more at location 286
A warning: my attempts to render these ideas in plain language will inevitably run up against Artforum’s preference for convoluted prose.Read more at location 292
language ‘becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,Read more at location 294
‘The sheer incommensurability of [the participants’] voices,’ wrote Kuo in her introduction, ‘shows us something of the impossibility and the infinitude of who we think we are.’Read more at location 296
everyone knows that ‘neoliberalism’ is something bad; that liberal democracy is merely a more subtle form of tyranny; that Western societies are racist and sexist by design.Read more at location 300
participants did little more than telegraph their own emphatic approval:Read more at location 320
Kuo revealed the real crux of the matter: What is art’s role in this political project?Read more at location 322
Laugh at it if you will, but the abstruse language disguised something very raw and simple – the desire for political mastery.Read more at location 325
The question is never, ‘Does this piece of art express something true, beautiful or good?’Read more at location 327
describes a method of investigating various social situations to determine which group is more oppressed and therefore has the better moral claim.Read more at location 332
Think of it as a sort of grievance Olympics.Read more at location 335
Take a hypothetical classroom conflict in, say, France, between a lesbian art history professor and a male heterosexual student of Tunisian heritage. All else being equal, intersectionality tells you that the student’s identity beats the professor’s.Read more at location 335
Hitherto, certain groups of people have been marginalised or excluded from the culture on account of their race, sex, class and so on, and the injustices committed against them have likewise remained hidden. The marginalised have been invisible, because the powerful have preferred to keep them out of the cultural frame and because the rest of us have been complacent.Read more at location 350
The Artforum identitarians are deeply suspicious of liberal visibility and representation.Read more at location 376
Contemporary identity politics is deeply illiberal.Read more at location 377
‘Fuck you … is a way of making yourself visible and audible,’ wrote Ara Osterweil in ‘Fuck You! A Feminist Guide to Surviving the Art World’, an essay featured in Artforum’s identity issue.Read more at location 379
Osterweil cited a 1969 piece of performance art by Valie Export, which involved the artist donning a pair of crotchless pants and walking around a Munich art-house theatre. Osterweil interpreted Export’s ‘art’ this way: ‘Export says, Why don’t you suck it? On second thought, she says, You ain’t never gonna suck it. This cunt is a weapon that will detonate your culture.’Read more at location 380
Wesleyan University in Connecticut, for example, offers something called the Open House, ‘a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamorous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM)Read more at location 405
they have now largely turned against visibility.Read more at location 409
‘We have a black president and black principal ballerina as well as trans visibility in sitcoms and reality shows,’ wrote artist A. K. Burns in Artforum’s identity issue. ‘But new is what capitalism feeds on.’Read more at location 410
For the identitarians, however, liberal capitalism’s seemingly infinite capacity to absorb and dilute shows how sinister it is. Hence the disdain for gay, lesbian and trans people who are actually visible in the culture – people like Caitlyn Jenner, the onetime paterfamilias of the Kardashians turned transgender icon, who also happens to be a Republican.Read more at location 420
‘The Jews were extremely visible in 1930s Europe, how much good did it do them?’Read more at location 439
queer theory denies the existence of a true, immutable self that is separate from the material body or from language.Read more at location 442
the moral awakening of Jane Austen’s protagonist in Emma (1815), the growth of the soul, so important in the nineteenth-century English novel, isn’t worthy of serious study. What matters to the identitarians is how, by the end of the novel, Emma learns to position herself within a ‘gendered order’, how she comes to ‘perform’ femininity and so forth.Read more at location 443
‘Art is not a space of pure self-expression,’ wrote the artist Hannah BlackRead more at location 447
For all their odes to difference, moreover, the identitarians are deeply intolerant of members of marginalised groups who stray from ideological orthodoxy.Read more at location 456
to say that a piece of art is legible means that it appeals to a broad audience, or that the mainstream culture can appreciate and understand it.Read more at location 464
art world is bringing together diverse and potentially incommensurable practices or artworks as though they’re all of a piece’.Read more at location 467
This was an astonishing reproach. Why does any creator address himself or herself to a potential reader, viewer or audience?Read more at location 468
The desire to be universally legible is thus among art’s oldest and noblest impulses.Read more at location 475
Those liberal sentiments are expressed in, say, the unlikely friendship forged by a white teenager named Huckleberry and a black slave named Jim as they drift down the Mississippi;Read more at location 490
In assailing universalist culture, the identitarians are continuing an anti-liberal campaign that was first launched in the nineteenth century with the rise of historicism, especially its Marxist variety.Read more at location 494
Put another way: there are many opinions about life; so all of them must be equally true (or none is).Read more at location 506
Universalist, legible art still brings throngs of reverent, beauty-starved people to the museums, galleries, theatres and cinemas.Read more at location 515
