Jed Perl is on a tear. His latest fulmination (subscription required) in The New Republic lashes out at John Currin (”what Currin doesn’t know about figure painting could fill volumes”), Kiki Smith (”whose dumb-beyond-belief Whitney show was full of the sort of neo-hippie baubles I wouldn’t buy at Target for $14.95″), Fernando Botero (whose recent paintings “have as much sense of form and structure as mushy brown gravy poured over marzipan”), and a host of others. What he’s so worked up about is what he calls “laissez-faire aesthetics” which he claims “violates the very principle of art.” And he has a point.

I don’t follow the art world closely enough to address his specific attacks on their merits, but I think the larger themes of the essay are worth grappling with. The crux of his argument is that high art is by its very nature exclusive and esoteric. The mingling of high art with pop culture is therefore an unholy union which threatens to turn museums into expensive shopping malls. But his take on this situation is more nuanced than the tired lamentations about pop art we’ve been hearing for decades. His point rests on the idea that what was once a dialectic between high art and pop culture has devolved into a raw pursuit of money through the time-tested marketing strategies of the taskmasters of pop. That is, while Andy Warhol may have been the “evil prophet of the profit motive” he was at least taking a risk, standing up for an idea, and engaging in a real conversation. Now, apparently, artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage are presenting works without meaning, without statements, that challenge nothing.

Should the art world try to maintain (or regain) its tendency towards the “daringly, rightfully, triumphantly intolerant”? Personally, I’m not sure yet — but I do think this is an important discussion to be having at a time when the art market is exploding and YouTube is helping to create and propagate some of the most inane pop culture this side of pet rocks.

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