The Irrelevance of Great Postmodern Art

Regarding the first question, there’s little academic agreement about art’s function. Surely, at a minimum, though, great art should be the result of some skill or talent. Modernists valuedoriginality as a sign of individual genius unrestrained by dogmatic institutions. At best, though, newness is a necessary condition of great art, since there are scribbles, noises, and hackworks that have never before been seen, heard, or read. Also, the cult of originality takes for granted a teleological, progressivist view of history according to which what’s in the past is necessarily inferior to what will come. I prefer Spengler’s more naturalistic, cyclical theory of culture, according to which all civilizations come and go, passing through stages of vivacity and decline. Art should also hold up a mirror to the society in which it’s produced and to the spirit of its time. But this too doesn’t suffice for great art, since anything can be interpreted as indicating the state of current culture or of human nature. Perhaps art should also point the way to a solution to social ills. According to Paglia, for example, secular art should fulfill a spiritual need that can no longer be fulfilled by theistic religion. Even if artists have no clue about how to improve their culture, Paglia implies that viewing great art will advance culture by improving the quality of its citizens.

This isn’t a complete theory of art, by any means, but we can take the combination of those criteria as a rough guide and ask whether any current,postmodern art is great in those respects. Much postmodern art seems arbitrary and indeed fraudulent as opposed to demonstrating much skill. Some such art, however, in the attempt to push the envelope, is perpetrated on a vast scale, incorporating tons of steel or gallons of paint, showing off the artist’s skill, at least, in socializing or in otherwise raising the funds to pursue such large-scale projects. And much postmodern art does indeed prove that originality doesn’t suffice for greatness, since many postmodern paintings, for example, consist of just such novel forms of scribbling.

The pointlessness or pretentiousness of this art does reflect the apathy and jadedness of postmodern society, but this raises the further question of whether a corrupt society can produce objectively, universally great art. If a culture is rotten and its art reflects that degenerateness by being equally rotten, the art must surely be as poor, in a sense, as the culture that spawns it. But perhaps art can be so rotten, as in the case of any Michael Bay movie, that the depths to which the work sinks are as awesome as the heights of the most elevated art. Perhaps art can be so disposable that it stands as an odious warning of the end of human vice. In that respect, even the worst of postmodern art can be permanently useful, albeit only ironically and paradoxically since the “greatness” of this art would consist in the work’s encouragement to do much better. As for cultivating the viewer’s character, much postmodern art seems rather to reinforce the conventional cynicism and relativism; certainly, most postmodern artists would merely parrot obsolete liberal memes by way of recommending how Western societies might be salvaged.

However, the technological revolution complicates the evaluation of current Western art. The fact is that virtually every conceivable genre of art is now being produced and indeed made freely available on the internet. If you go to theLast radio website, for example, you’ll find lists of musicians occupying micro niches within niches. There’s electronic music, of course, but then there’s ambient music and then drone and then dark ambient and drone doom and then drone metal; then there’s funeral doom, drone doom metal, sludge, post-metal, stoner metal, sludgecore, sludge doom, and so on and so forth for all other music genres. Something similar is so with respect to painting, creative writing, and even acting. The internet has indeed allowed anyone to publish his or her own art. There are, for example, an astonishing number of blogs on every conceivable topic, including something as outlandish as existential cosmicism and the undead god. There’s more art created now than anyone can imagine and so as a matter of sheer probability you’d think that at least a fraction of this outpouring of art must be great.

Even were there now such hidden gems, though, the new ways in which this art is distributed raise the further question: Is all great art necessarily recognized as such? The works of many great painters, for example, became famous only after the painters died, having languished for years in obscurity, ignored or belittled by the art establishment--and that was before the advent of the internet and the information glut that afflicts consumers. There can be too much of a good thing; indeed, you can turn what was once a boon--when it was hard to come by or consumed in moderation--into a poison by consuming too much of it. An apple a day may be healthy, but twenty apples every day is not. Perhaps, then, technology has made art so abundant that we’ve become bored with it: not only have we peeked at the man behind the curtain, but we know everything there is to know about him; we have his cell phone number and he’s at our beck and call. When you can find not just free music, but any conceivable kind of music--and just by tapping a few keys--music may lose its charm. They say that the more you pay for something the more value you ascribe to what you buy, to justify the price, and thus the better you feel about paying so much for it. The corollary is that what can be so easily attained will seem all the more disposable and thus not worth having. (The stereotype of the loose woman works in the same way: when a woman is easily seduced, the man loses respect for her since he assumes she’s worthless as a trophy and likely won’t be faithful to him.)

This follows the pattern of Murphy’s Law: the harder something is to achieve, the more it’s worth having and the fewer the people who achieve it, whereas the fewer the troubles encountered in pursuing something, the less worthy the thing is and thus the more the suckers who settle on something so unimportant. The point is that prior to the democratization of art distribution by the printing press, television, and the internet, when art was truly a delicacy for the elite, art was prized if only as a status symbol, like a flat belly in the midst of so many MacDonald’s “restaurants.” Art in a postmodern society has no such high status, because it’s consumed along with the air we breathe. Thus, a democracy is usually the opposite of a meritocracy. Two heads are better than one only if one of the heads isn’t a dunderhead that will spoil things for the pair. The more heads you put into the mix, the more dunderheads you introduce and thus the lower the standard that must be suffered for group cohesion. You’d think that the dunderheads would be outweighed by the geniuses whose input would also be increased, but this assumes that the dunderheads equal the geniuses in number and influence. In those societies that are beset by poor public education systems and by waves and waves of media misinformation emanating from the likes of Fox News and talk radio, the dunderheads might well drown out the elites, which will shift the average and lower the standards of art, consumer products, politics, and everything else that depends on public demand.

To sum up, I suspect that there is great art now being produced in the West. This art is the product of great skill and originality and it deals with important topics. The problem with postmodern art may lie not with the artists, then, but with the consumers: we postmodernists are spoiled and we take our godlike knowledge and power for granted. The internet is the fabled horn of plenty, and just as the spirits in the Christian heaven would be insufferable, condescending pantywaists, so too our vices are exacerbated by the environment we help create. We steal much of what we find on the internet because we want the best deal possible, and that in turn is because we don’t make enough money to be carefree with our purchases; we don’t earn a living wage, because we settle for politicians who protect society’s naturally oligarchic structure, and we settle because the candidates’ technocratic handlers exploit our biological biases and so easily manipulate us. Then we enter a self-loathing phase as we realize we’re abusing a doomed business model in which content creators offer the fruits of their labours for free on the internet just on the off-chance that their work will go viral. Moreover, like decadent aristocrats we’re surrounded by such opulence that we become corrupted. We lose sight of the value of what’s in front of us because we equate its value with the ease with which we can obtain it (just by clicking away at the mouse for a few seconds); thus, we commit a form of the genetic fallacy. And so both the artists and the consumers suffer: the latter impoverish the former, and the former punish the latter with haystacks of mediocre art in which are buried perhaps some pins of great artworks.

The upshot, then, is that the quality of art is no longer decisive. Postmodernists are jaded because we’ve seen too much: too much art, too many religions, too many political scandals, too many celebrities, too many scientific discoveries, and on and on and on. The problem isn’t that we obviously have more history behind us than any previous generation; rather, we have much more information about that history, thanks to technological advances which have democratized the flow of information in general and not just the distribution of art. Our greater access to information has empowered and thus corrupted us. (Just imagine what a debauched tyrant God would be.) Wikipedia all by itself fulfills the adage that a little learning is dangerous: anyone on the internet now can learn a little about anything under the sun, and so we’re boastful and rude in our electronic mockeries of social interactions. Moreover, we’re inundated with media-generated images, news stories, jingles, and sales pitches, and so we’re glutted; we’re sick of our cultural follies. We’ve become desensitized to both the best and the worst of what we can accomplish. Somewhere in the cultural maelstrom may likely be found artworks that nourish the soul, but who has the patience to sift the swarms of inferior works or even the incentive to believe that nourishing anything is worthwhile or that there’s such a thing as a soul in the first place? The problem isn’t so much that art is dead, but that the postmodern art consumer is dead inside.

http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-vacuity-of-postmodern-art-and-of.html

Here is a extract from an internet article about a viewpoint based on postmodernism. I thought it was interesting when the author mentioned how, 

"Much postmodern art seems arbitrary and indeed fraudulent as opposed to demonstrating much skill."

It may be that postmodernism art in some people's opinion is just a form of abstract art with not much skill involved compared to the modernist idea of originality and perfection. It seems to suggest postmodern art is to some people just a regurgitation of trying to create something new that has already been achieved before. But that is the great thing about postmodernism, there is no right answer. 

– Adam Reid