WHAT IS ART TODAY?

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

--Andre Malraux

What images? Among those currently proffered to the public for contemplation: a series of six, large, identically white pictures by Walter de Maria differing only in that on one the artist has written in pencil the word Sky, on another River, on a third Mountain. Four packing-case-sized and identical boxes by Robert Morris, painted white and spaced at equal intervals on the floor. A row of what appears to be eight truncated shoeboxes, the work of James Seawright, each containing a variant of the figure eight in sometimes flashing lights, while every now and then a taped voice croaks out, "Eight." A flight of wooden stairs covered in gold-colored carpet, entitled Euclid by Joe Goode. A creation called Die by Architect-turned-Sculptor Tony Smith, which he admits he ordered by phone. And why not? It is only a six-by-six-by-six-foot cube in slab metal--a piece of art on which the artist has not laid a hand.

These are examples of the latest in "minimal" art. The present art scene offers other creations: paintings that are an eye-blinding dazzle of stripes; canvases that are cantilevered from the wall right over the living-room sofa; gadgets that jiggle, wiggle, writhe and spin. And, though it is past its peak, there is pop: an assemblage in which a real lawnmower leans against a painted canvas; Brillo boxes designed to look exactly like Brillo boxes; cartoons blown up to mural size, complete with dialogue balloons and lithographic dots; old bits of crumpled automobiles presented as sculpture; an old Savarin coffee can containing 18 brushes in turpentine and frozen in ineffable permanency. Sometimes the subjects are erotic. Edward Kienholz's plaster couple makes love in the back seat of a real, if dismembered, car. Larry Rivers' seven-foot, three-faced Negro in plywood achieves vivid connection with a complaisant friend by way of a flashing light bulb. A disembodied female breast by Tom Wesselman looms, big as a mountain, over a diminished seashore.

Are these images sufficiently powerful to deny man's nothingness? All are declared to be art by the museums that show them, by the critics who explain and hail them, by the collectors who buy them. This has its advantages over the old days when the young artist suffered from neglect and sometimes died unrecognized. But in this day when the most radical young artist is threatened not by neglect but by the possibility that he may be considered over the hill at 30, a few critics and some painters who themselves were radical only a few styles back are beginning to raise an old question: What is art? They are worried not so much by the extravagance of some objects that are accepted as art as by the fact that there seem to be no criteria, no opposition, not even an insistence on the artist's uniqueness or individuality--the very claim that used to animate artistic revolutions. More and more people are beginning to feel that the current state of art, as Robert Frost said of free verse, is like playing tennis without a net.

Broken Illusion

The net has always seemed solid only to those who, with Plato, considered art to be the imitation of nature. The classic anecdote of the triumph of art as artifice concerned Zeuxis: when he unveiled his painting of grapes, birds flew down to peck at them. What the anecdotists seldom added is that Zeuxis' rival won the contest, for when the judges turned to unveil his painting, they were stunned to discover that the veil itself was the painting and declared him the winner because he had fooled the judges, while Zeuxis had fooled only birds.

Actually, mimesis as a theory of art was an illusion, invented by a beholder for other beholders. The artists themselves always knew that they were exaggerating, distorting, filtering--to express worship of the divine or a view of man, to make the real more real. But whether the emphasis was moralistic (said Tolstoi: "Art is the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings"), or emotional (Ruskin: "The first universal characteristic of art is tenderness"), or esthetic (Baudelaire: art is "the study of the beautiful"), or hedonistic (Santayana: "The value of art lies in making people happy"), the theory of art as imitation held on. It was finally destroyed in the 1880s--partly because of the appearance of the camera, which copied nature so much more accurately than could any human hand. Artists began to talk of a painting as "an object" in itself rather than the representation of something else.

"A painting--before being a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote--is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order," said one painter-polemicist, Maurice Denis, in 1890. Thus began the rapid but epic evolution in which representation was first blurred, then distorted, then broken into fragments and finally disappeared altogether in abstraction. The artists arrogated to themselves (as did the poets at the same time) the right to say what art was, with the added inference that if the viewer (or reader) did not understand it, that was his fault. "It was as if suddenly," says Painter Robert Motherwell, "an established church had dissolved. Each artist became his own self-ordained priest, charged with deciding for himself such questions as what is god or what is sin."

The New Church

It was an exhilarating experience. But inevitably, within a few years a new church was established. Says Artist Saul Steinberg: "This church has its saints, who are accepted only after they are dead. We have the holy bones of Mondriaan and the miraculous blood of Soutine. This church has its martyrs, like Jackson Pollock. It has its bishops and cardinals--the critics and museum directors. The museums have encouraged the production of icons, holy images, and other good luck charms that have no artistic value outside the church." The church also has its missionaries--the dealers. Among the leading ones right now is Manhattan's Leo Castelli. A few years ago, the story goes, Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning remarked, "That son of a bitch Castelli, he has the nerve to sell anything. He could even sell beer cans." Whereupon Jasper Johns proceeded to create his famous pop-art beer cans. Since the emergence of pop, with its move back to representation, abstraction has ceased to be the absolute dogma of the artistic church, whose chief theology today is the "reality theory."

This theory of art as an object turns every object into potential art. As one philosopher, Columbia Professor Arthur C. Danto, admits: "What in the end makes Rauschenberg's real beds streaked with paint and Warhol's Brillo boxes art is the theory. Without the theory, one is unlikely to see them as art." This does not satisfy all the critics. Says the Observer's Nigel Gosling: "Take a table and put it into a gallery, then it's art. But take eight of them and put them into a gallery, then it's a restaurant."

What then is art? The modern sages offer no solid answers. Says Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art: "It is an expression of individual sensibilities. A neon Coca-Cola sign is in a very real sense a piece of art. The fact that anyone could make it is more or less beside the point. The fact is that no one else did make it." Says the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred Barr, who is viewed by many as the untiaraed pope of the modern art world: "It is folly to say what is art. Works can become art by fiat --sometimes the fiat of one man. And it can be art for a while and then not art. It's obvious today that comics are art. Just because these things are vulgar, doesn't mean they are not art." Says the former director of the Tate Gallery, Sir John Rothenstein: "Art derives from the intention of the artist. But time is the only impeccable judge."

The necessity for considering the artist's intent and personality is the only common note that modern opinion strikes. It is a doctrine that brings art criticism down to the plane of psychoanalysis. The principle was perhaps pushed to its extreme by Peegy Guggenheim, who has admitted that she was not much impressed by Jackson Pollock as a painter until the day he urinated in her fireplace.

Meaning in Meaninglessness

The situation has produced a new kind of patron. "Most collectors today are not just satisfied with buying art, they want to buy a piece of the artist as well," grumbles one dissenter. "They want to belong to the art world, go see dirty movies at night at Andy Warhol's apartment." And Warhol in turn becomes a feature of gossip columns and a fixture at society's tables. Any day now he may be wrapped in plaster by the plaster master, George Segal, and propped against the bar in somebody's penthouse.

The situation has also produced a new breed of critics whose function is not to enunciate or defend standards but to be explicators and publicists for the new. Rothenstein, once a champion of innovation himself, now complains: "Scarcely anything, when it is quite new, however manifestly idiotic, is forthrightly condemned." Small wonder. Past critics were thoroughly cowed and browbeaten, not unjustly, for their classic misjudgments, beginning with the scorn neaped on Manet's Olympia and culminating in the ridicule showered on the impressionists, the Fauves and the cubists. Critics now live in terror of seeming square. The trouble is, as one anticritic remarked, they are now saying more and more about less and less. That includes some museum officials who are critics as well. Describing a box by Richard Artschwaser, Ralph T. Coe of Kansas City's Nelson Gallery wrote: "The cheeselike surface of his formica triptych opens to reveal--absolutely nothing. This work reaches clear into the unlimited recesses of the mind: recesses that could frighten." Sam Hunter, critic and director of Manhattan's Jewish Museum, commented on a work by Barnett Newman, maximum leader of the minimalists; it was a large canvas, all red except for four thread-thin vertical stripes. Wrote Hunter: "These fragile and oscillating stripes play tricks on the eye and the mind by their alternate compliance and aggression. Brilliantly visible and all but subliminally lost . . . their cunning equivocation quite subverts the concepts of division and geometric partition." Sarah Lawrence Professor William Rubin said of Jasper Johns: "For him the image is meaningful in its meaninglessness."

The artists themselves do their bit. Painter Ad Reinhardt, who has so "refined" his paintings that they are currently all the same size and all look absolutely black until sufficient staring reveals an invariable cross of rectangles, is wont to make such statements as: "There is no place in art for life . . . the one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness."

"Esthetics is to art what ornithology is to the birds," quips Barnett Newman. On the contrary, too many modern painters seem to listen first and paint afterward, to be guided by the art theory of others rather than an art instinct of their own. The turnover is so fast that a style is lucky to last more than a couple of years before it is pronounced dead by the critics. With such a declaration, many a collector decides that he had better unload, prices decline, and artists get despondent. More in anger than in jest, Painter Jimmy Ernst ticked off an "unhappy proliferation" of present and possibly future styles: "Op and pop, sop (soft-edge-optical), plop-plop (from catsup bottles), abrev (abstract revisionism), exab (express-abstraction), geopimp (geometric-post-impressionism), kipab (kinetic-pcst-abstraction), syncromesh (easy to shift), nero (new eroticism), and perhaps even esthex (esthetic experiments between consenting adults in the privacy of their home).

All this provides no answer to the question, what is art? The artists' own attitude in general is a questioning, as in science, rather than an affirmation, as in humanism. Being heretics with no common cause, rebelling against a permissive society with no settled faith of its own, they often seem driven into intellectual dead ends or fragmented tantrums of defiance, fighting unseen gusts that are perhaps not there. It is hard to be different among crowds of other people trying to be different. In the Dada decade, Marcel Duchamp could shock people by exhibiting a urinal turned upside down and calling it Fountain. Seeing it for the first time today, hardly anvone would flinch--although a few might try to flush.

If art no longer shocks, it seldom edifies. Gone is the romantic reverence that made a work of art an object of worship; now it is apt to be just a household object, a neatly executed artifact. Is that enough? "If a painting does not make a human contact, it is nothing," says Motherwell. "The audience also is responsible. Through pictures, our passions touch; therefore painting is the fulfillment of a deep human necessity, not a production of a handmade commodity. A painting, or a man, is neither a decoration nor an anecdote."

Duty to Judge

Perhaps the best thing about all the decorations and anecdotes that clutter the scene is a sense of humor, a sense of freedom, a suspicion that anything can happen--perhaps even passion. In this welter of the current art world, it is still possible to say, or sense, that some things are good, some bad. There is the almost haunting fact that one metal glob or set of blinking lights will somehow tug at the imagination, while another will not. That Savarin coffee can full of paint brushes, which is in the Museum of Modern Art at the moment, is a visual bore. But Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around it is somehow amusing. Kienholz's latest exhibit, an abortionist's chair, complete with curette, bloody rags and fetus, has some horrid documentary interest, even if it need not be confused with El Greco's best work. Tony Smith's huge constructions have a presence (even if they are ordered by phone) that a pile of concrete blocks by Carl Andre have not. Something called Liaison, by John Bennett, has some strange charm, looming like a cross between an oversized scuba diver and a mechanical caricature of an elephant (though it's hard to see in what corner of the living room it would fit). But there is no such justification for those Euclid stairs; even as a literary joke, they are not worth the floor space they occupy, and someone ought to have the energy to say so. George Segal's plaster figures, produced by the ostensibly simple method of wrapping a subject in plaster-soaked rags, are unaccountably melancholy and powerful. Why? Modern esthetics sayeth not.

Yet it is that "why" to which today's art viewer must cling for dear life. It may be futile to insist any longer that one thing is art and another is not. Let everything be called art. But if so, it is more necessary than ever, in a time when to mention beauty has become a gaucherie, to decide that one work but not another has authority; that this one but not that one expands the senses or compels the imagination. The gallerygoer cannot stop the tastemaker from talking. But he can stop listening quite so docilely. Ultimately, art can be of value to him or to posterity only if it somehow enhances his own awareness of the world--by sight, touch or emotion--but it has to be his own decision. He has a duty to look long, learn and then judge, to like or not to like. He may make hideous mistakes. That is his risk--too few people take it--and better than abdicating personal reaction in favor of fashionable theory. For time, as today's uncertain men agree, is the only final judge; and the live viewer with his feet aching is the first voter in a poll whose results he may never know.

In the end, Andre Malraux expects too much when he asks for images to deny man's nothingness; that is turning art into religion. But if art need not deny the nothingness of man, it is urgent for man to deny the nothingness of art.

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