The Brooklyn Rail

Something is seriously amiss. The problem is multi-faceted, and the culprits are many. The market, social media, new technologies, galleries, mega-galleries, auction houses, museums, art fairs, biennials, collectors, critics, curators, art schools, universities, etc. all deserve blame. Wide-spread dissatisfaction with the state of things among the art world’s denizens and participants, especially artists, is real.

Museum directors, after publicly lauding one of their current exhibitions, have been known to privately make the “gag” sign as they walk off stage. A New York Times article detailing the meteoric rise, then precipitous crash of the careers of several young painters never once mentions the abysmal quality of their work. In the quest for audience expansion, meaningless, forgettable “pop” figurines are exhibited in the same institutions that have in their collections, among other masterpieces, magnificent, timeless Egyptian sculptures. Mysteriously—blame Instagram?—there are simultaneously hundreds of almost indistinguishable brushy abstractions, wan narrative paintings, Richter-esque figurative smears, Polke-Stingel-ish dotty patterns, Rococo abstractions (how Trumpian), crude cultured strewn enigmas, and tapestries—no shortage of tapestries!—being produced in studios worldwide. MoMA weekend evening ground-floor events (what they promote as “Date Nights”) are accompanied by pounding music so loud and throbbing as to render impossible a contemplative art-viewing experience a few floors above. It’s become increasingly difficult to retreat from the din and dishonesty to enter the cone of silence and truth, and often isolation, where thoughtful invention thrives, where true innovation can germinate. But it is still possible. If my unscientific random-conversation-and-reading sample is indicative, the rediscovery of the splendors and solace of past achievements is definitely taking place. Witness the passionate, pervasive acclaim for the Met’s spectacular Siena exhibition, greater than for any recent show of contemporary art.

In 1978, when I was twenty three, I set out in my VW bus, a beautiful and rare 1971 panel van with dual sliding doors, from my native Los Angeles bound for New York. In my month-long meandering journey across the country, I made a point of visiting museums in St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. It was my first time experiencing so many landmarks of art history. I mostly avoided modern and contemporary art on my voyage, and once in New York, although I regularly surveyed contemporary galleries, my predilection for the far past continued.

I supported myself during my early years delivering packages in Manhattan with my van, and any time I ended up near the Met, I would play hooky and run in for a few minutes to refresh. A few years ago, I sat opposite Daniel Brodsky (the museum’s Board Chairman at the time) at a gala dinner and had the opportunity to thank him for the Met’s longtime pay-what-you-wish admission policy—an especially appreciated gift during this artist’s relatively penurious early years. In subsequent decades, I began to regularly tour Europe, chasing eagerly around the continent to drink in its even greater ancient aesthetic wealth.

As a student, my favorite artists were Duchamp, Picasso, Frank Stella, Walter De Maria, et al. I loved the radicality of Analytic Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Conceptual Art. Within a few years, the Modernists were joined, and somewhat supplanted, by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio, et al in my personal canon. And so I became a time-traveler.

Suggestions, Principles, and Observations

First, study the history of art. Know, really know, what your fellow humans, from prehistory to today, have brought into the world. Regularly visit non-contemporary art museums, churches, temples, and archaeological sites to directly experience and learn from historical works. Knowing only what’s going on in art today, being conversant exclusively with art of the twenty-first or twentieth century, is inadequate, limiting, and debilitating. It is nigh impossible to create anything new and original if one does not know what has been done before. Attempt to grasp the ritual, richness, and depth in ancient art so that you can submerge yourself in its beauty, humanity, and spirituality.

Too many viewers can’t get past the depictions of saints and kings, et al., in older art—a perennial complaint. There are reasons artists such as Duccio, Bellini, and Velázquez chose the subjects they did. It’s important to familiarize yourself with the content in older art so that you can immerse yourself in the subjects portrayed, realized with such intensity and skill.

Armed with your knowledge of the history of art, establish as your goal to make works that are better than the finest works ever made. You will almost certainly fall short in this quest, but to have any chance of producing art of the highest quality, to achieve absolute greatness, you must set out to surpass the accomplishments of the past. Be brutally honest with yourself when comparatively assessing what you produce. Don’t compose statements—create masterworks. Make timeless, not timely, works.

Make significantly less art per year. Then spend more time on each work. Be willing to take big risks and go to extreme lengths to make significant art. Consider committing to a major speculative project that may require several years to create. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make monumentally large pieces. Even modestly-scaled works can achieve maximum intensity if allotted the time, without external pressure, to be fully realized. Have the courage, dedication, and patience to doggedly pursue the superhuman, and be willing to fail big-time.

Aim to create art that can be described as exquisite, extraordinary, phenomenal, stunning, magnificent. “Interesting” works almost never are.

Summon universal, all-encompassing human/cosmic themes, concepts, and endeavors. Commentaries on our times—on current politics, your community, your culture, your friends and family—in a word: limiting. Small goals = minor results.

If you discover the work of another artist that is even tangentially similar to yours, be willing to abandon that body of work and move on to another. (This presupposes that you have more than one idea/style/trick in your arsenal.) If someone else is doing something that is, in essence, related to what you are doing, what you’re making is de facto unoriginal.

Many of the great works of the past were conceived of and realized in conjunction with concurrent technological breakthroughs. Filippo Brunelleschi’s astounding, elegant dome for the Florence cathedral is both a technical breakthrough and a high aesthetic achievement. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably both the greatest painter and the greatest scientist of his age. We have subsequently devolved to the point where it is practically inconceivable that the smartest person on Earth would be an artist, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t theoretically possible. Keep up with advances in science, technology, and industry. Be open to incorporating those leaps in the making of your art. Experiment constantly. Aim high.

Universities should encourage their best and brightest students—the summa cum laudes—to pursue studio and art history studies in parallel with their physics, computer science, biology, engineering, and mathematics classes. Art courses shouldn’t primarily be the refuge of those who don’t excel elsewhere, or those who don't have specific goals, or if they do, whose ambition is more for their careers than for their work.

In an October, 2023 New York Times essay, “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill,” Jason Farago wrote:

To find something new! That was the imperative of modernism, not only in painting but also in poetry, in theater, in music, in architecture and eventually in the cinema. Your job as an artist was no longer to glorify the king or the church, nor to imitate as faithfully as possible the appearance of the outside world. It was to solder the next link in a cultural chain—fashioning a novel utterance that took novel shape even as it manifested its place in a larger history. “You have to be absolutely modern,” Rimbaud declared; “Make it new,” Ezra Pound instructed. To speak to your time, we once believed, required much more than new “content.” It required a commitment to new modes of narration, new styles of expression, that could bear witness to sea changes in society.

Here, I have purposely risked being dismissed as preachy, simply because I believe that the issue before us—the abysmally low state of art today and what to do about it—has reached a critical point. It’s time for public dialogue to get much closer to what’s being whispered privately. If I come off as cranky, so be it. There’s too much at stake.