The Great Trouble with Art in This Country

The great trouble with art in this country at present, and apparently in France also, is that there is no spirit of revolt–no new ideas appears among younger artists. They are following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do better what their predecessors have already done.

So spoke Marcel Duchamp in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in 1946. I can imagine him rolling his eyes now to see so many mimicking what he did well, and definitively. There is plenty of art out there that takes "something from an earlier period [to] adapt it to your own work" and produces a creative approach. Most commonly now "following along the paths beaten out" by Duchamp.

Newness was only a rallying cry because of the academic rules surrounding art. How is it that the rule has now become new, new, new. What does that even mean?

The Museum of Modern Art currently has an exhibit on post-temporal art (The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World) based on the curator's idea that progression is meaningless when artists now have access to works and ideas from around the world instantaneously. Art was only about progress when art was understood as art history, bound by chronology and the Enlightenment's ideal of progress. Linking as we do across the internet no longer seeks to move forward but to produce connections, more like the rhizomatic web of Deleuze and Guattari than a ladder ever upward and outward.

Now is populated by what has been and what will be and new is no better than old, when there is so much more in it all. The 20th century wanted new, but that might not be as important for the 21st. New is often wasteful, ignorant, and blithe.

The MoMA show does a stupendous job of presenting art that is not worried about being new, creating progress, but content to use the materials and ideas that support the work, from wherever and whenever. I didn't like all the works, but the display was invigorating. If a museum, that receptacle for art history, can begin to reject the steel jaw of chronology then we might actually be looking at a new age for art, though not of art. And, wouldn't that satisfy all those who want something new?

No?
Oh well.