I came across this article on Spiked about Jed Perl and thought I’d do a follow-up on my earlier post. The Spiked article emphasizes some other aspects of Perl’s dissatisfaction with contemporary art that I think are worth addressing.

One issue here is a general skepticism towards postmodern values, which I must confess I share. It’s not that I don’t find postmodern work interesting or valuable (I was delighted to find Richard Prince’s Paintings – Photographs on Amazon for $20), but this viewpoint does lend itself to abuse. At a certain point you have to find something that is concrete and essential in a work to get a grasp on it, but there is a tendency to focus on context at the expense of the actual work.

Another, related point is the role of democracy in the arts. It could be argued that for a museum to be filled with Rembrandts and Mondrians makes it a sort of elitist institution — it refuses to participate in the kind of culture that most people are really interested in. It claims that its standards are higher than the denizens of the MySpace-YouTube Axis of Drivel. Perl turns this argument on its head by insisting that the refusal to make the Mondrians available to the prols is in itself a kind of elitism. It is tantamount to claiming that Jane Wine-box can’t possibly grasp a Mondrian, so why waste her time with it? The museums were instituted for the noble purpose of bringing high art to the masses, and why should that role be any different now than it was fifty years ago?

Clearly Perl’s arguments have a hyperbolic ring to them. The Spiked article quotes Perl as saying “Surely in a wealthy society we have room for a Kandinsky, a Mondrian and a motorcycle show?” — but it’s not as if museums have stopped showing Mondrian. And it seems to me that plenty of art critics are still capable of discussing the formal qualities of a work apart from its cultural context (although I’m not in a good position to judge that, having no formal training in art and not really following the critical dialogue). A lot of people are also probably thinking that Perl is just another Greenbergian curmudgeon, bitterly fighting against cultural trends he doesn’t comprehend.

But I think there is a kind of conceit in certain conceptions of the ‘postmodern’ era. The name itself betrays that conceit — it’s as if there is a belief that we have moved beyond the fundamental problems that faced people a hundred years ago, that we can just slough off the baggage of structuralism and hierarchy like an old pair of shoes. The idea that a work of art can evoke feelings that are both universal and deeply personal, that there are essential human problems that can be addressed through art, is being thrown out as well. This, I think, is what’s bothering Perl — that as we try to move beyond the modern era, we start to deny essential aspects of what it means to be human. One of those aspects is the ability to have a truly personal and intimate relationship with a work of art.

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