The Brooklyn Rail

The phenomenon which interests me is modern art. It is the great art of our time. I think it is a much larger affair than we want to acknowledge. It constitutes a new form of art and a new way of thinking about art and the world. Today, it is a tradition of two hundred years and counting. I believe it has not run its course; though, I acknowledge, the majority of contemporary artists lack the ability, for the moment, to think about it and seem unable to practice it. The result is that we get a lot of very bad art out there.

We have a problem of education. It’s like expecting the current society in America to appreciate the crucial importance of the separation of church and state, or that power resides in a constitution. Instead, it opts for a strong tribal leader and even goes to the extreme of suggesting that he is anointed by God. This is a reactionary response and a failure to understand modernity. Artists also need to understand modernity in order for them to practice modern art.

“The End of Postmodernism” is a problematic title in that, to start with for me, modernism itself was a misunderstanding. Postmodernism, for me, never existed. You acknowledged as much when you said that, in retrospect, October doesn’t look much different from Clement Greenberg. That was very apparent to me at the time. It was all about trying to build a different position in order to get a career. None of that interested me.

And, as you say, these terms serve to classify movements and to align them in normative fashion with cultural trends and periods. However, I think that if one wants to understand art, one has to abandon this mindset. I read those writers back in the 1980s and found them without much interest, on balance. It all veered off into the theoretical. I stepped out of that world, in consequence. Hegel is not our friend in this regard. I think that if we remain wedded to these outlooks, then the whole thing is over.

For me, thinking about modern art is very much not over. However, I have understood that my only chance is to cover the topic on my own terms, which is to say what I think modern art is. Whether this can get the interest of contemporary readers is uncertain, certainly not many. But, at least it will be an individual attempt to articulate why art is important and which art I deem worth attention.

Issues of race being addressed in the visual culture right now? Just to focus on your last paragraph, I wonder if those who write on art should be exploring these issues that you mention. There is the danger of sliding into sociology and then getting into the habit of thinking of art as an illustration of those sociological and cultural issues. This just makes for bad art, quickly forgotten. Shouldn’t they be writing on how the experience of young artists from different backgrounds is filtering into modern art which, again, is the art of our time? We need artists of diverse backgrounds to take these issues that you mention of their identity and infuse them into modern art. Of course, few can do this. One can perhaps suggest that Basquiat managed, to some degree. So we get very excited, perhaps too excited, about Basquiat. What we do not need is artists to abandon modern art in order to cultivate provincial styles which explore their identities.