Marketing Mozart and Warhol

At a birthday party yesterday evening, I found myself in a conversation with a man who wanted to know about what was going on in the art world today. Somewhat flummoxed by his belief that anyone could actually answer that questions, I asked him what galleries or museums he had last visited. He said he did not really know where to go. He wanted to see today's great artists, though. You know, the Mozart and the Warhol of today.

I think the record inside my brain came to a screeching halt. I blinked and with sincerity replied that if Warhol followed Mozart for him then I really had no idea what to suggest.

I really had no idea what he meant. Trying to explain, he launched into a story about how Warhol drew daisies in a field when he was six while other children played. And the daisies were really well drawn. He knew how to draw! So it wasn't just a soup can because he could draw. My confusion grew. But, I tried to suggest, Warhol isn't significant because he could draw well. It's his ideas, I proposed, that were catalysts. (I did not here go into any of the arguments about whether the ideas belonged to Warhol or whether he simply took other people's good ideas and ran with them, as he might have learned working in a marketing firm; nor whether there is any significance to Warhol's presence in the screen printing factory when the works were being produced, as my sense was that the conversation could better maintain its cocktail party parameters by evading these denser theoretical issues.) But he could draw, the man repeated. Yes, but nobody cares about that, I said perhaps a little too bluntly.

Nobody values Warhol's line or color or artistry. It's the symbols that he permitted to resonate across art. It's the ideas that others have found in his work that made him significant. Warhol was great for creating a cultural artifact out of the new industrial and mass consumerist lifestyle of the post World War II United States. From the new major global power came its first self-generated cultural production.That, as a nation, we have come to embrace that one cultural production about industry and consumption with a nationalistic fervor–one which still resounds in much seemingly cutting-edge, "ironic" contemporary art–is simply because the United States is so young, culturally speaking, and hasn't yet learned that to shift out of one cultural identity into another, must then be followed by shifts into others. Warhol was great, but he wasn't great like Mozart, I said finishing my rant. The two are totally different. If you had asked Mozart what makes the bars of this sonnetina any good, he could have told you. Warhol could not explain his own work except to embrace what others said about it.

He nodded. There's nothing wrong with that, I added. Great art doesn't require the artist to explain it (how boring!) but if the work is a response to an ideology or theoretical paradigm, maybe they should? I asked. He nodded.

Does anybody care about Warhol in Europe? He asked me. My brain spun like a top trying to get a fix on where we were. Here was a man whose work oversaw the development of assorted optical programs, who was married with a six year old daughter, and he really did want to learn more about art from this conversation. I could tell simply from his earnestness. But I could not continue in this vein without having my own head explode.

As much as anywhere else, I replied getting up to get another drink, but don't forget that he still doesn't have his own chocolate candy.

I believe he nodded at that.

Changes in The Scandal of Susan Sontag

The conference on "The Scandal of Susan Sontag" offered an impressive array of feminist scholars. I hesitated for a moment before attributing that socio-political label, but I do not think any of them would be offended. The speakers had been Sontag's peers and significant advocates of a free path for women, even if they might have occasionally disagreed with her particular point of view. The first panel discussed her recently published, and seriously edited, journals from the years leading up to 1963 when she was thirty, had completed her education, and was just beginning to experience the success and fame she would embrace in the years to come.

One of the last questions posed by a member of the audience asked if there were any concerns that the journals revealed a side of Sontag far more uncertain than the fierce and imperious image she had presented in life. That absolute certainty had been a part of her success; she never worried about angering people with her opinions, even sometimes seemed to revel in the discomfort she caused. Were they not worried that we would begin to think of Susan Sontag differently with this new information? I was surprised by the question.

Why would we think of her now as any had thought of her then? Why should that be important?

I don't look at Manet's Olympia with the horror it caused the French when displayed in the 1865 Salon.

A quote from the Picturesque Lottery for the Salon of 1783, is quite clear in fact that we change the way we look at things: "Up to now we only expected amusement and neatness from their brushes; [women artists] show today vigor and nobility. They are finally the worthy rivals of our sex; and men, who had previously assumed their own talents to be superior in all respects, can from now on worry about real competition."

In fact, Susan Sontag was an advocate of change, which she discusses in some detail in her 1964 essay "One culture and the new sensibility". She recognized that art was "becoming increasingly the terrain of the specialist" and saw that as a part of the transformation of the function of art. Art's reference to the production of art, as well as its conscious use of other materials, produced an inter-textuality that was often only meaningful to students of art. She grants the discomfort caused by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Albers. Their collaborations, improvisations were "changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art". For her, "art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility". This new sensibility was of great importance to her, and a topic to which she returned in her continuing considerations of what would eventually be termed cultural studies. She participated in the new sensibility with her own works, but largely for her support of the new works being produced, glorying that the "seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense". A new sense was encouraged because that is what great art has always done.

The culture changes and works of art change too. Those who have come before become a part of the canon, or not. Some get forgotten for a while, relegated to obscurity until there is a reconsideration, for example Vermeer. Others' riotousness is incorporated into the education system so that Whistler, and Susan Sontag, can be found on most college programs, in one department or another, despite their once shocking life choices. Nothing remains scandalous if kept in the spotlight long enough.

I do not consider Susan Sontag particularly shocking, though I disagree with some of her views. I don't like Dali (with the exception of Hallucinogenic Toreador) but am not disturbed by him as the conservative communists were with his The Great Masturbator. I can't stand Jeff Koons' work enough that I don't even try to understand his 'art'. Yes, I did just put that word in quotes in reference to what he does. In time, the culture views the life and work of the artist in a new light.

The next generation comes along. The world finds new wars. People change. Art changes.