Where the Gods Are Now: They Don't Make Art Like They Used To?

From Andy Warhol's cow wallpaper to Lady Gaga's burning bed: on the dispersal of art into popular culture, and what it takes to find it there.

16 min read

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, each 50.8 x 40.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Originally shown at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, displayed on a shelf resembling a supermarket display. The work entered MoMA's collection in 1996.

In 1966, Andy Warhol papered the walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York with wallpaper, the same cow's head printed pink on yellow, repeating floor to ceiling with the mechanical regularity of the soup cans and the Marilyns, and inseparable from its support, so that one could not be entirely certain whether one was inside a work of art or inside a decorated room. The distinction, Warhol had decided, was no longer the most interesting question, and whether the rest of the art world agreed with him was beside the point. Almost half a century later the question he had set aside is still being asked, and asked with conviction, by people for whom the cow wallpaper might as well never have happened.

In the Wall Street Journal, reprinted in The Australian, Camille Paglia mounted a frontal onslaught on contemporary art. Does art have a future? she demanded. The performing arts were thriving the world over, opera, theatre, music, dance, while the visual arts had been in slow decline for nearly forty years, no major figure of profound influence emerging in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. The malaise was the sharper, she argued, for the contrast with architecture, which still has its influential high priests, and here she names Koolhaas and Gehry, while art continues to languish. This seems like reactionary flimflam, but it does not deserve to be discounted altogether. The famous Pareto principle dictates that 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes, a rule of thumb good for social analysis, marketing, and other enterprises. It can also be transposed to the opinions of ultra-conservative commentators: they are wrong most of the time, but on rare occasions they have an alarming grasp of the truth. It remains only to uncover in what respect Paglia might be correct.

She made her name in 1990 with Sexual Personae, long, erudite, and provocative, in which she took up the model Nietzsche advanced in The Birth of Tragedy, that art is to be read through the conflict and complementarity of two opposing forces, the Dionysian of ecstasy and chaos and the Apollonian of order and harmony, so that art is born of these essentially pagan tensions. At the height of feminism in art and literary criticism she drew both praise and scorn for her defence of male artists, whom she sees as embodiments of a particular creative and libidinal urge, and the book was swooned over by the likes of Anthony Burgess and Harold Bloom, its erudition everywhere on show. But already she had an aptitude for the quick swipe, for editorialising, and a tendency to fall under the spell of her own brilliance. As a self-styled public intellectual she went on to alienate many women by itemising what she took to be feminism's damage. One count was that it had robbed boys of role models, the macho star and the superhero relegated to a suspect zone of male aggression, leaving boys to waver in guilt and indecision. Partly true, perhaps, except that the flow of action heroes never stemmed: action men kept selling in shops, and models of powerful male heterosexuality have never been in short supply in popular culture.

Nonetheless, the shrill note she sounds about the doldrums of the art world seems a sign of the times. Only a week after her article appeared, The Observer reported Dave Hickey's public renunciation of the art world. For him, art had become a subsidiary of the hedge fund business; the critic had begun to resemble a courtier class, advising the rich on acquisitions; and works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, and Marc Quinn were the product of too much fame, too much success, and too little critical sifting, and were greatly overrated.

This is probably true, but whether such artists are representative of the many admits of two answers. They are, inasmuch as they are the ones who are collected and who garner the most attention. They are not, inasmuch as there are thousands of artists and critics in continental Europe, in China, and wherever else who have next to no interest in them. Still, with commentators as varied, as experienced, and as influential as Paglia and Hickey voicing anger and disappointment at once, we might call it a striking coincidence, or a real problem, or we might ask for more detail.

Contemporary art, or some of it, the art in their sights, might be specious and dispiriting, but what are the qualities it lacks? Hickey is known for his defence of beauty, while Paglia blames the diminution of quality on the expansion of form and the contraction of ideology. The first she puts down to the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and 70s, the second to artists having lost touch with their audience, sealed in an enclave of upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the decade she admires. Awash with emotive adjectives, brash and fiery, she misses the fact that it was precisely that antiestablishment attitude which brought about the multimedia revolution that dethroned painting. And painting has not been dethroned in any case, mainly because it remains the mainstay for upper-class liberals to park their money.

It is worth parsing her not because the argument has any merit but precisely because it is endemic of the misleading posturing that diverts from the central issues. She bemoans the death of the avant-garde, which she lays at the door of her hero Andy Warhol. The death of the avant-garde is certainly ascribable to the weakening of ideology, but it is a common error to blame art for it. Her diatribe is a symptom of a problem that has run since the avant-garde's demise: the habit of making art a straw man for the much wider social conditions it merely reflects. Art is not to blame for the loss of faith in revolution, or for the quizzical attitude to change that besets politics. In art as in politics there is no longer a positive, or plausible, outside that might pose as an alternative to the status quo. The condition is one of constant alteration, slippage without change. In the summer of 2011 the Islamists in Egypt smothered the emancipatory potential of their revolution; Occupy Wall Street came to nothing; and so on. Don't blame art.

In a recent book that riffs off Jameson's commentaries on postmodernism, Jeffrey Nealon makes the point that the collapse of the economic into the cultural, which Adorno glimpsed dimly on the horizon, has now decisively arrived. The gesture is Baudrillard's: reality has not been becoming indistinguishable from the movies, it has become so. We reach the postmodern place where economic production is cultural production and the reverse. And the provocation that follows is the one that matters: if ideology critique depends on a cultural outside to the dominant economic logic, where does cultural critique go once there is no such outside, no dependable measuring stick by which to celebrate a work's resistance or denounce its complicity?

Paglia, it seems, has taken on a much bigger issue than she thought. It is worth recalling that the title of her article is 'How Capitalism Can Save Art'. She is not hankering after an avant-garde but after its opposite. In an abstract and unsupported flourish she claims the better creative work is now being done in industrial design, whose products are shorn of ideology and cant, which sounds absurd beside her complaint that art suffers from too little ideology. And yet there is a percentage of truth in it.

Her citation of Warhol is the place to look. He incorporated into his art, she notes, all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism, the Campbell's soup cans that most artists had stubbornly scorned. The presumptive final clause insinuates that he was a visionary in this. Not so. Pop began in England with Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake, and Warhol's contemporaries, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, and Rosenquist, were just as busy promoting mass culture. What Warhol did that no artist before him had done was to build a micro-culture of artists, designers, film-makers, hangers-on, and misfits who were at once the audience-alibis to his role as artist-guru and the means by which the boundaries between forms of creative activity were collapsed. The Factory, which moved through three venues in its history, was an ad hoc stage on which art and fashion were no longer rivals but active complements. His designs were built to travel, to move from the canvas, only ever their provisional and commodity-auspiced support, out into fabric and wallpaper; one recalls his cow wallpaper. He never lost sight of his training as a designer of shoes in the 1950s, the illustrations of which he raised into a charming sub-genre of their own, poised between commercial and fine art. It is this fluidity that lends his discrete canvases, the large works lining the walls of the great museums, their cool incongruity.

On one level, following the now hackneyed lesson of Pop and the line of his peers, the subjects of his work were a banal contradistinction to the higher subjects a museum was supposed to display. On another, the serial photo-serigraphy challenged the notion of uniqueness. The motifs were all spillage and dissemination; the image could go on and on. But the proliferation came at the price of meaning, since repetition has the power of annulment. In this way Warhol confronted the viewer with the grim truth about fame. Fame is occasioned by relinquishing one's image for a small set of facsimiles that are then circulated with promiscuous rapidity. The price of fame is death; it is no coincidence that his portrait of Marilyn appeared after her suicide. The Factory was a reflexive fame-generating machine, cranking out works that were genuine Andys and serving as the site where Andy himself could play at being himself as the artist. He played at artificial celebrity, which could nonetheless not be separated from the real thing. He performed at celebrity and the celebrity was his art, and his art was his celebrity. Meanwhile everyone was trying to find the real Andy behind the hard carapace of the deadpan ingénu. His example afforded the valuable insight that the true self is indistinguishable from the false, made self. Was it a human fact, or a by-product of mass culture? Warhol certainly made us rethink what it is to feel in front of a work of art.

Only in recent decades has Warhol come to be acknowledged as prophetic of what grows more evident in art by the year: that we cannot merely look at popular culture in art, we must look for art in popular culture. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not simply transplant popular motifs onto the canvas to defile the precious sense of high art; he confounded the distinction from many angles and in many media. So Paglia is in part right that better art may be found in design than in the galleries, though with a caveat sizeable enough to disqualify her conceptual bigotry.

What we are facing, and what in hindsight was already incipient in Warhol, is a shift away from judging art from the vantage point of art. I have no wish to be cryptic, but it is customary within art theory to position oneself as if viewing through the frameworks of art, genre, and tradition. This work borrows from an aspect of popular culture; that one recasts design to render its function non-functional; another rethinks the traditions of painting. This is broadly the position inherited from Duchamp, for whom an object's identity is recast by its placement in a gallery or its designation as art. A shovel or a urinal in a gallery is art before it is a shovel or a urinal. In the right context, the state museum above all, the anchorage of an object as an artefact of art is apodictic, beyond dispute. One can dispute it, but the dispute is always shadowed by the echo of the avant-garde: the disgruntled conservative, the outraged bourgeois. One is invited to dispute within the gallery, safe in the knowledge that such disputes fall on deaf ears and are worthless. The most one can do is decide what is good or bad art. But it is all art, whatever one thinks. One's view is part of the tacit cultural game played in one's own head; it cannot get a work thrown out of the gallery the way one might return a dish at a restaurant. The circuit is of a piece with the wider condition of political helplessness, the absence of an objective outside.

But what if, taking Warhol's cue, we looked for art within other frameworks? The word within is the operative one. The suggestion is not quite that of land art or happenings, except that those genres were at least conscious of their own brinkmanship and could, at best, be audaciously willing to let the work dissipate and fall back into so-called real life. Reformulated into the self-conscious, packaged form of Relational Aesthetics, the same impulse insists instead that the a priori status of art, judged from the standpoint of critique and evaluation, be maintained. Rather: what if we looked for art within music video, fashion design, street art, and commercial photography?

The exhortation is more complex than it sounds. Since the 1970s it has grown acceptable to show commercial photography and fashion inside art museums, and there is by now the fashion museum proper, one of the largest of its kind in Antwerp. From the late 1980s, when visitor numbers became an index and popularity was conflated with commodity in the name of making museums viable, such exhibitions became a staple. It is thanks to this that pieces by Yves Saint Laurent and Vivienne Westwood sit unequivocally in collections from the National Gallery of Australia to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thanks to it that no one would dare question the art status of a photographer like Helmut Newton. But to move an object from one station, design or popular culture, up to the status of art is to perform an act of sublation, like conferring a knighthood. With the museum's approval the object is relieved of the is-it-really-art question. We look for artness in it already satisfied that the institution, and by implication history, has ratified the search.

My suggestion is different. It is to look for artness within popular culture and outside the gallery frame altogether. Begin with popular music, generically cast as classical music's other and, like fashion to art, hemmed in by its ephemerality, its pre-packaging, its commodification. And yet within pop, taken loosely to cover everything from indie to hip-hop, there is work of real inventiveness and complexity, and therefore of lasting merit. Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and the Beatles' White Album come to mind. Justin Bieber will be remembered as a purely popular phenomenon, while some Paul Oakenfold or some David Guetta may survive as music. The same holds in fashion. The work of Alexander McQueen has earned growing recognition as a kind of corporeal, living sculpture, and though it now graces museums it was never made for them, but for the catwalk and the world beyond it. Already in the Highland Rape collection of 1995 the cloth was torn and then reconstructed so that the violence done to it survived in the finished garment as a material fact rather than a depicted one. The art lay in what the garment had done to its own conditions, not in what it pictured, and the museums that now keep those clothes were slow to see it.

One instance repays a closer look. In October 2009 McQueen showed his final collection, Plato's Atlantis, and had the fashion photographer Nick Knight stream it live, the first runway show broadcast to the open internet. The song chosen to debut at that show was Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance', and when she sent her followers the link the servers buckled under the traffic. Within weeks the song had its own video, and into that video she carried McQueen's closing look, the armadillo shoes among it, the twelve-inch hooves that mutate the foot into something between a creature and a machine. The designer would be dead within four months. So the most ubiquitous pop product of its season arrived wearing the last sculptures of a dying man, and almost no one watching it on a phone knew or cared.

The video is set in a white-tiled bathhouse. Gaga is hauled from a pod, made to drink, stripped to her underwear, and auctioned; men in a viewing gallery bid on her; she is sold, and at the end she incinerates the buyer and is left smouldering on a charred bed, sparks coming off her body. It is, in other words, a parable about being sold, made in order to be sold, and sold magnificently. The fusion of fashion, performance, and dread is worthy of Matthew Barney and would have put the Surrealists to shame. And here the comparison cuts the other way. Barney's Cremaster Cycle was hailed as a new direction for video art, yet it drew directly on McQueen and on fashion photographers such as Knight, and much of the acclaim for its novelty owed simply to the art world's ignorance of what the fashion world had already made, since that work was not deemed art and so lay beyond the horizon of scrutiny. Barney's work claims and holds the status of great art. 'Bad Romance' makes no such claim and wants none. It is a commercial product, built to push a song and a pop icon. And it is exactly within that whole, bound into the tireless flow of the product, that the glimpses of art appear, striking and somehow immaterial, there and not there.

Street art makes the point more plainly still. We need not reopen the interminable question of whether it is really art; some of it discernibly is. Amid the generic muck of iridescent blobs an image arrests us, well-achieved, stimulating, charming, or jarring, and it stays. What amounts to discernibly is the next question.

In the eighteenth century two qualities were prized above most: wit and taste. Both were indefinable and both were incontrovertibly real. As the Enlightenment by degrees transferred the power of judgment from a godhead to the freethinking individual, the individual's discriminating powers gained enormously in value. Taste then carried a far deeper resonance than it does now, when it is largely confined to one's clothes, one's music, one's friends, and the decoration of one's rooms, all of them markers of personal will and watered-down descendants of the older thing. For taste in the eighteenth century had a moral gloss; it was a refinement that extended to how one ought to act in a given situation, with dignity, discretion, and compassion. What survives in the word today is an implication of the same in its faintest form. And the capacity to discern in matters of aesthetics and morality has been further debased by the higher value placed on its economic counterpart, the capacity to judge quantifiable worth.

One of the undeniable hallmarks of the artwork in the heyday of postmodernism, the late 1980s and early 1990s, was the very absence of taste. Some of us still remember the special issue of Artforum at the end of the decade that noted the most common word in the critic's lexicon had become banal. The unrepentant culprit was Jeff Koons, who openly cast himself as Warhol's successor and who certainly set the ball of banality rolling. The age of kitsch was a celebration of capitalism at its most aggressive and rapacious, consumption and excess so overheated that no room was left for the containment that taste implies. Kitsch was discussed far more than taste, or than the deeper historical concept of taste itself, and it was the devaluing of taste that opened the way to the many jeremiads about the loss of art's social conscience and its inglorious decline. In that account art had surrendered its old power to grant us reprieve from the images the multitude prefers, by doing those images better than popular culture could. What set art apart from the analogous seductions of popular culture was that its images served not only pleasure; they were laced with irony and sometimes derision. In that respect art was doubly alienating. But once again art was blamed for a condition of which it was only the visual representative, since its cynicism was little more than the cynicism of global corporatisation and its grip on government policy, which has produced the deadlock of contemporary politics, the dissatisfaction with democracy, and the impotence of the person on the street, an impotence whose temporary antidote is apathy.

So we must ask why some art, and the capsules of artness embedded, as I have argued, within popular culture, continue to hold us. It is not a matter of rapt desire or the lure of fetishisation, in which an ever-renewing train of substitutes is needed to keep us interested. It is rather that good art performs the perennial function of offering us assurance, and release, in a certain goodness in the world. Not a conventional goodness, the vapid benevolence of a Christian kind, but more the reminder that excellence exists, that something is 'truly' worthy of us. If those glimpses no longer inhabit the fringes or the avant-garde outside, but only the inside, then they have to be prized out.

Here, then, is the answer to Paglia's forced and clumsy conundrum. It is not that we have lost our gods, but that we must know where to find them. Like Walter Benjamin's angels of history, they hide furtively in the thick and erratic texture of popular culture, which is where art now resides. Together with globalisation, that culture is a far larger entity than it was in Warhol's day, or even when Koons began; social media and digital communication have folded it organically into our lives. That art is no longer the cool, objective alternative, the outside, is not a failure of art but a sign of more complicated weaves of social organisation, communication, and the economies that come with them. Those who worry about the state of art might be reminded of two things. First, that since the independent artist and the independent critic both emerged in the eighteenth century, art has always been moaned over and the fates always called to witness. Second, that it matters enormously where one looks. The pressures of overpopulation and urbanisation are pushing would-be artists into film, graphics, and decoration. This is not to say that film or interior decoration is art, nor to reopen the tired debate about the extent to which craft and design are art. It is to say that there are regions, pockets, enclaves, and exceptions within these practices that deserve critical attention. The task is to make peace with the old opposition between fine art and popular culture, and to go well beyond Warhol in doing so, even if it was Warhol who first gestured at the truth: that art is not a separate kingdom bordering popular culture but a particular quality of attainment within the expanded field of popular mass culture.

To find that quality we must expand our capacity for discernment. Consider, last, the empty perfume bottle Viktor & Rolf once sent down the runway, set among the wearable garments of the ensemble. It holds nothing, does nothing, makes no claim on the status of art, and is for that reason the most artlike object in the show. No institution ratified it; it sits there in the ceaseless circulation of the product, unbought and uncollected, which is where the gods have lately preferred to hide.

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References

Camille Paglia, 'How Capitalism Can Save Art', The Wall Street Journal, 5 October 2012; reprinted in The Australian.

Andy Warhol, Cow Wallpaper, 1966; Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962; Marilyn Diptych, 1962.

Edward Helmore and Paul Gallagher, 'Doyen of American critics turns his back on "nasty, stupid" world of modern art', The Observer, 28 October 2012.

Alexander McQueen, Highland Rape, Autumn/Winter 1995, London; Plato's Atlantis, Spring/Summer 2010, shown Paris, 6 October 2009, live-streamed via Nick Knight's SHOWstudio.

Lady Gaga, 'Bad Romance', music video, dir. Francis Lawrence, Interscope Records, 2009.

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Viktor and Rolf, empty perfume bottle (runway object).

Matthew Barney, Cremaster Cycle, 1994 to 2002.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917; In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest, 1973.

The Beatles, The Beatles (The White Album), Apple, 1968.