2/8/05
Dear Bill,
I have finally figured out how to approach the subject of art theory. Until now, I thought that one had to develop an argument against it, but that effort always seemed to be somewhat pointless. After all, art theory is so lame intellectually that the task of developing an argument against it is almost too dreary to contemplate—and embarrassing, like developing an argument against religious fundamentalists, which the art theorists resemble in more ways than one. Then, too, it began to feel as if it were too late to argue against it, now that theory-types are talking about life and art “after theory.”
So the era of art theory is receding in the rear view mirror. Nonetheless, bits and pieces of art theory still give a kind of substance—something like ectoplasm at a séance—to much of the art criticism and curatorial blathering that we read, and those who write press releases and wall labels would never be able to fill up their empty spaces if they didn’t have those theoretical bits and pieces to arrange and rearrange. Image of Shelley in the desert at noon or in the Coliseum by moonlight come to mind.
For reasons I won’t go into now, you can’t be truly modern unless your pulse quickens at the sight of a “colossal wreck,” provided that it is ancient. Given the shortness of the art world’s short-term memory, art theory is certainly old enough to count as ancient. It is in enough disarray to count as a wreck, a ruin, a heap of glorious fragments. And, in the eyes of its surviving practitioners—as in those of easily awed art journalists—it is or was big enough to look colossal. So the romance of art theory now belongs the to romance of ruins that we Westerners have been carrying on ever since the beginning of modern times. In ruins now, art theory is glamorous.
Having seen that, I saw that art theory had always been glamorous. Its appeal was not its intellectual power, which, as I’ve suggested, is negligible. Art theory’s interpretations of its favored artists are simply dopey. Sherrie Levine’s art as a challenge to the myth of male genius? Yes, according to her and her theoretical supporters, but how feeble can a challenge be and still count as a challenge? Levine’s work did nothing to discourage Shakespeare worship or Rembrandt worship or, for that matter, Walker Evans worship. Far from challenging myths of genius, Levine’s art made her a candidate for genius-status, and that is the position she occupies in the art theorists’ pantheon—though of course they never use the word as praise, of her or of any of the artists they favor. Yet they praise Barbara Kruger as the brilliant, daring innovator—in a word, the genius—who “deconstructed” the “male gaze” and consumerism, when, after all, she made a career of providing hip collectors with targets for their gazes, which were, in fact or in spirit, those of consumers and Neanderthal males. They praise Michael Asher for his “institutional critique,” though he made a career of supplying museums with desirable goods: works that look edgy and challenging in a doggedly stylish way. In short, Asher developed from Minimalism an austere sort of glamor, and art theory acquired some of its glamor by inventing empty, absolutist—and right-thinking—terms of praise for him and for others who played the fake-radical game.
The thing to remember about glamor is that it may shock but it is always safe, for glamor does two things at once: it asserts our most banal and reassuring assumptions; then it obscures them with an aura of newness and urgency that is always, explicitly or implicitly, sexy. Thus certain people are not glamorous because they are sexy; they are sexy because they are glamorous. Anyway, as weak as they were as intellects, the art theorists were effective enough as rhetoricians to charge their judgments with the sexiness of absolute truth. Truth, when it is absolute, is sexy in the way that power—I mean, absolute, absolutely dominant power—is sexy, and the glamor of art theory has a strong tinge of S&M. Art theory tells us what to think, and if we are people of the right sort, we obey. It is remarkable how many in the art world did obey, and how many now yearn, in the time “after theory,” for those long-ago days when obedience was still possible, still demanded, still rewarded with the warm certainty that one had submitted utterly to the indubitable—the necessary—Truth.
Never an intellectual tradition worthy of challenge, art theory is a rhetoric of glamor in need of interpretation. Having seen that, I realized that I have a way to deal it. I would like to write a book called
Hot Logic
The Glamor of Art Theory
The book might consist solely of an essay called “Hot Logic.” Or it might include with that essay shorter writings on the subject, as well as letters and poetry that seems pertinent in one way or another. All that remains to be decided.
We’re off to
Best wishes,
Carter
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