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Contemporary art, uncovered: a survey of major newspapers and weekly magazines suggests that visual art is steadily losing ground in the popular press, even as its audience—and market—grows exponentially
Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Peter Plagens
These circumstances, plus the audience's presumption that modern and contemporary art require some kind of initiation, a baptism in the waters of esoterica, make the field a niche market. And--in the view of many of the uninitiated--it's a niche of mainly overprivileged, even decadent, white people. As Douglas Wolk, an alternative-weekly arts writer in Portland, Ore., says, "Contemporary art seems like a super-rich person's game, like polo or something. Mainstream media don't devote enormous numbers of column inches to polo ponies, either, and with good reason." Andras Szanto, former director of the now-defunct National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, offers a fuller version of the hypotheses: "The relentless professionalization of art has meant that art is becoming more theoretical and complicated and by its own volition positioned at an ever greater distance from the average educated viewer. I mean, we're not talking about pretty landscapes. This specialization is at odds with the daily newspaper, and indeed it is the number one arrow in the quiver of the antagonistic editor: 'Our readers don't care because this is way too specialized."' Accessible or not, to many readers contemporary art is an ugly downer when it's trying to be serious, and insufferably self-satisfied and ironic when it goes upbeat. In either case, it's not terribly appealing as mainstream media fodder.
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Contemporary art is also the victim of its own ancestral success as modern art. Simply put, contemporary art isn't underground and radical anymore, like its early-modernist great-grandparents were. It survived an abusive childhood, grew up, got rich and became the putatively transgressive arm of the entertainment and fashion industries. At this writing, the most popular television program in the art world, hands down, is the fashion "reality" show, Project Runway. Matthew Barney may indeed be a deep and disturbing individual artist, but the School of Matthew Barney (it's out there, folks, breeding like tree frogs) is about as genuinely "alternative" as an alt-rock FM station that plays a lot of Radiohead. With artists like Spencer Tunick now occupying the Robert Mapplethorpe daring-photographer slots and the Pipilotti Rists of the world posing as our current Jack Smiths, such "reality" TV shows as the boob-implant series Dr. 90210 and the surveillance-camera festival of adultery, Cheaters, seem more like the real deal. They're a hell of a lot more crisply produced than most art, and refreshingly less pretentious in the bargain.
No wonder that scholars of contemporary art ensconced in academe have, in large numbers, deserted their cognate field. They've become convinced that art--you know, Art--is either not so special after all or doesn't even exist as a distinct cultural entity. "Visual culture"--that is, signs, symbols and images from throw-away graphics to satellite surveillance photographs, presented on everything from cheaply printed matchbook covers to 4-foot plasma screens--is where it's at. "Art" may be buried in there somewhere, but who cares exactly where? A "common thread" that runs through visual culture writing, says Elkins, "is the assumption that fine art has become thoroughly entangled in popular culture, and from that observation it sometimes follows ... that it is old-fashioned or misguided to engage in special pleading for 'high' art." These days, ambitious young artists tend to follow academic theoreticians rather than lead them, and consequently, they make art that deliberately and often ironically looks more like just another kernel of corn in the succotash of "visual culture" than it does like that ol' sour pickle, fine art.
