Spectacular society has allowed sentiment to over-run the avant-garde

More than I normally would want to know about the philosophical fads and nonsense of the art world but none-the-less insightful and informative. From The Avant-Garde’s Slide into Irrelevance by Michael J. Pearce. A sample:

Many adherents to the aesthetics of the avant-garde in tenured positions at American art schools and universities are still enthusiastic supporters of the ideas and strategies that won them the culture wars of the late twentieth century. They steadfastly cleave to the doctrinal ideas that brought them into their positions of power and authority and have entrenched themselves in defense of an exclusively Euro-centric cult of avant-garde art. But as Western culture has changed around them, they have been outflanked by sentiment and technology.

The foundations of the avant-garde were built upon the opposition of true and fake art. The avant-garde provided true, ethical art, while its opposite pole was fake, sentimental kitsch. The Frankfurt School writer Norbert Elias was first to identify sentiment as the enemy, followed by Herman Broch, who provided doctrinal writings describing kitsch as evil, and tying true art to the exposure of social reality. The young Marxist Clement Greenberg came to the game late, famously bringing their ideas to an American audience with avant-garde doctrines that despised kitsch and favored an elitist intellectualism. Regardless of the importance of emotion in human relationships, a fundamentalist rejection of sentiment in art coupled with an embrace of ethical confrontation became doctrinal to the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century.

Representational artists—painters and sculptors who make images of people who look like people and things that look like things—were their favorite targets, partly because this was the dominant art of the West’s Soviet enemies. The Soviets used representational Socialist Realism to propagandize their ideology, and made use of sentiment as a manipulative tool. American Communism had fallen into disarray after the Stalin / Hitler pact in 1939, and after the war revelations about Stalin’s gulags turned many communists anti-Soviet. The US government courted their allegiance, enthusiastic to present America as the open-armed home of free thought – even if that thought was opposed to the government – in contrast to the straight-jacket of totalitarian doctrine. This created the paradox of American Marxist avant-gardists being set against Soviet Socialist Realism. Offering avant-gardism as a liberating alternative to the constrictions of Communism was essential to America’s strategy for winning the cultural Cold War. If the enemy restricted and controlled art in the East, in the West artists were encouraged to provide political commentary and to transgress. The avant-garde was fresh, seductive, and appealing. If sentiment and representation were the tools of our lying enemies, we must offer the opposite—concept and abstraction.

The establishment of the avant-garde depended upon an intellectual and financial dominance of American arts that was still possible when cultural gate-keepers like Greenberg, Alfred Barr, Nelson Rockefeller, Larry Gagosian, or Charles Saatchi maintained authority over the limited number of literary, museum, and academic outlets that controlled the discourse and development of American culture. Until the late twentieth century, critics could still speak of the “art world,” as a Western hegemony, a monolithic defensive line in which all artists must participate as avant-gardists or be sidelined.

[snip]

By the 1980s the disintegration of the avant-garde art world had already begun. McEvilly had recognized the Western bias of the avant-gardist cause and pointed out its hypocritical exclusivity. He argued for a multicultural relativism that broke down the unilaterally white, Western, male order of this art world, giving equal credence to art originating from other races, cultures, sexual orientations, and genders, hoping to create a globalized culture that paid equal respect to all of its parts. But instead of creating a new, homogenized and inclusive art world, by the noughties and teens of the twenty-first century, this had led to bitter infighting and vicious power-struggles within the entrenched avant-gardist community as the various special interest groups fought from their corners.

[snip]

A generation of students has arrived at our universities which has grown up within constant reach of smart-phones, gaming consoles, and the internet. Born and raised in the twenty-first century, these students have never known a world without immediate electronic connection with friends and entertainment. They have no personal memory of 9/11, did not live through the last century’s culture wars, and think of the Second World War as ancient history. Consequently, their experience of reality is absolutely not the same as that of previous generations. Nor is their experience of art. Instead of receiving art through the vehicles of art magazines controlled by avant-gardist gatekeepers, they are under a constant deluge of images from a huge number of sources.

Much of this torrent is superficial. Much of it is an overload of the senses. Many of the people consuming it are wholly, thoroughly, and fondly addicted. When we walk across any university campus, we see two-thirds of the student body walking alone, in the characteristic pose of our time, with head down, gaze focused on both hands held together at waist height. Many of us decry this. We want to interact with them, but feel completely blocked by their digital focus, as if watching them in a boat at sea while we walk along the shoreline. But can we blame them for their distraction? They are afloat in a flood of extremes, a competitive flow of images that are bigger than, better than, and more than everything that has come before, in every sphere. Many of these images unashamedly appeal to sentiment. They are thoroughly kitsch. They have nothing to do with political ideology. Fluffy kittens! Pretty puppies! Cartoon selfies! There is no chance whatsoever of a small elite class of avant-garde authorities exerting any control over the aesthetics of the imagery our students share.

Spectacular society has allowed sentiment to over-run the avant-garde. With the popular abandonment of the heart of their philosophy, the avant-garde is hopelessly outflanked.