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1. Is Art Necessary?
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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Chapter 1 Is Art Necessary? T he challenge that modernist art posed at the beginning of the twentieth century lay in its uncompromising rejection of what had been central to the artistic traditions of our civilization. Sensuous charm, the representation of intelligible content, and the nobility of thought and feeling were now banished from sight and hearing, with the effect of forcing a reconception of art. To accept the modernist enterprise meant that coherence , recognizability, and beauty could no longer be insisted upon without appearing to reject all that defined artistic creativity in the modern world. But the result is that, a century later, this challenge has produced not just skepticism about the ideal of beauty that art was traditionally to embody, but skepticism about the nature and function of art itself. Although artistic modernism is founded on the faith that art is one of the highest of human callings, its success is bound to call into question whether art is indeed necessary when it becomes incomprehensible, sensually unappealing, and deliberately provocative. The conviction of art’s necessity cannot be divorced from the nature of its form and content. Postmodern art shares with modernist art this effect of calling its own significance into question; although making use of elements of various historical styles of art, including modernism, it does so without a sense of historical narrative. The diversity of approaches to painting that are considered compatible with postmodernism, from neorealism to neoexpressionism, raises questions about the significance of these 13 approaches themselves.1 Even the return to unabashed representation in neorealism fails to portray a significant content, and certainly not a narrative content such as was traditionally considered essential to painting. Postmodernist architecture, like postmodernist painting, also embraces a wide variety of styles and approaches. But in the most characteristic cases, the return to some elements of traditional form, such as pediments and gables, occurs without a corresponding return to classical ornament in the forms of identifiable orders and entablatures . The effect is more of an ironic commentary on formal possibilities than a coherent approach to architectural design: again, the question of the artistic significance of such a style cannot be avoided. Finally, the advent of a less dissonant music rooted in a rudimentary tonality is often hailed as a return to some semblance of tradition by those weary of the atonality of modernist composers. But again, there is a gulf separating the postmodernist minimalism from the premodernist tonal tradition, for there is no melody, only a monotonous rhythmic repetition or static chords as the focus of attention. Such music, too, raises the question of the significance of the art in the absence of beauty. This sense of the loss of significance through the exhaustion of possibilities in the arts is what underlies the growing perception that art has reached its end. The museum of art may now include anything because there is no criterion defining art.2 Yet today a deep skepticism reigns regarding the highest values of truth, beauty, and goodness that once defined art: this is the essence of philosophical postmodernism. Although it seems to have little explicitly in common with artistic postmodernism, it has clear consequences for how art is regarded, and in particular for whether art is held to have any compelling purpose or significance. This new skepticism is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger; it begins from the point of view that there is no rational truth, no absolute good or moral virtue, no transcendent source of authority.3 There is therefore no beauty, no compelling argument for art such as the traditional doctrine of beauty once supplied, and no tradition that can still be asserted. Indeed, it sees the death of art as the characteristic of the postmodern era.4 The new skepticism strips ideals (both moral and aesthetic) of their presumptive rightness, and decries—in a line of thought inherited from Marxism—the attempt to maintain a culture that displays such ideals publicly as an imposition of the values of one class on another, or of one social group on all others. But this postmodern skepticism 14 Between Transcendence and Historicism [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-30 06:20 GMT) regarding the arts is an outgrowth of the earlier modernist aesthetic, in which traditional categories of beauty and moral purpose for the arts were decisively rejected. In this condition, it is well that we take a step back to the era when the arts were held in...