She covers Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, in The Weekly Standard. Here is the link, which offers only a bit of the review to non-subscribers. Here is an excerpt from the critical part of her review:
…few critical observers would agree that contemporary American art has put its best work forward in recent decades, when our artists and art institutions have enjoyed more riches than at any other time in history. Contemporary American artmaking has been monopolized for nearly a half-century by postmodernism, a politics-obsessed formulaic approach that has yielded such shock-art masterpieces as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (which finds itself in numerous museum collections). Artists who do not work in the postmodern mode are excluded from museum exhibitions and the best galleries.
Of course, no better can be said of the products of the European art world, whose denizens have, at best, striven to vie with their postmodern American counterparts for the prize of Most Shocking. But to argue, as Cowen does, that "the American model encourages artistic creativity [and] keeps the politicization of art to a minimum," is to be unaware of how narrow and prescriptive American artmaking has become. The simple fact is that artmaking in America has been taken over by a single bad idea, despite the ample and diverse funding it receives.
Her last sentence is a good illustration of how two people can look at the same facts and see such very different patterns.
As someone in the arts, I agree with her wholeheartedly. One of the few honest reviewers/culture critics you will find on the subject, especially with regard to the visual arts.
Good Lord, are Gerhardt Richter, Cy Twombly and Howard Hodgkin postmodern
“shock artists”? They are contemporary painters, they are in LOT of
the best museums. Heck I agree with tiberius, Serrano is not a shock artist.
Maybe Lynne Munson is a post-modern “shock reviewer”?
When does she think american art put its best foot forward if not in the
last decades? Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, Joesph Cornell,
Jean Michel Basquiat, who’s beating them, Whistler & his mom??
Heck even that bum Wyeth is mainly from the last half century.
Unless you really really like fat people or all baby Jesus all the time,
now is the time for art my friends.
Extremely funny! I wonder if the Weekly Standard was conned into publishing self-satire, Social Text style.
Munson’s categorization of contemporary art is lacking in subtlety. Museum exhibits are dominated if not monopolized by variants of post-modernism and post-post modernism, but these often include works tending more toward the weird in their hyper-expressionism than just toward politicized and shocking elements. Also, it ignores the minimalist and other strands. On the other hand, the idea that such as Serrano are not “shock artists” seems to be quibbling about terms. A cross picture in urine or “blood and semen” may be mainstream in museums, but even one Guardian critic noted it was “much more about being lurid than anything else.”
In my own view, where Tyler’s points about “good and plenty” hold up is in the art world beyond the politicized museums and their elitist clientele. For figures ranging from $1000 to $10,000, very fine works from a variety of genre and artists who, although relatively unknown, rival or surpass 19th century American greats like Eakins or Cassatt can be obtained. That’s what expanding marketplaces provide.
Kevin, let’s get some facts straight.
Jasper Johns (1930-), Mark Rothko(1903-1970), Jackson Pollack(1912-1956), Joesph Cornell (1903-1972) were not really active in the last decades of the last century. Who said Gerhardt Richter(1932-), Cy Twombly (1928-) and Howard Hodgkin (1932-) were shock artisits? Besides they have been around a long time, thus are contemporary only by the fact of their longevity. Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was political and postmodern.
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