The End of the Arts: The Finite Life of Culture
The pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno posited that the distance an object such as an arrow travels, can always be divided in half, thus it would never reach the tree it was shot at. Well, if you see an arrow embedded in a tree trunk, you know it’s not being divided in half any longer. Just like what’s known as “Zeno’s Paradox,” it is commonly assumed that the evolution of human cultural achievements will never reach a termination point. As long as humans are alive, they will continue to contribute to an evolving, profound body of cultural achievements. It is my position that this is not true. They have already reached a termination point – sitting embedded in the metaphorical tree if you will, and reached it prior to the beginning of the 21st century.
First of all, I would like to define what I mean by “profound” with reference to a body of cultural achievements as opposed to merely creating or contributing to cultural activity. Obviously culture per se has continued on and shall undoubtedly continue to do so. But what quality of culture? Is it something new, stylistically singular, influential and will stand the test of time? Is it merely the best of whatever else is being done at that particular time? Or is it just a rehashing of prior styles, works and subject matter or something first enjoyed during one’s informative teenage years that belongs solely to their generation’s claim as their own, which lingers on only on the strength of nostalgia?
The philosopher Arthur Danto [1] cited the evolution of painting as having shown “signs of internal exhaustion, or at least marked limits beyond which it was not possible to press.” – in other words, “exceed.” If art history could be looked at as an evolving story then, as he put it, “a story was over.” He posits that although art would continue to be made, it would not be any kind of “next stage” of that story. Since the 70’s or thereafter, art would, and I paraphrase, “manifest an awareness of a history of art but no longer carry it forward.” Creativity would no longer be seen as belonging to the great narrative of history. He speaks of “a certain kind of closure (that) had occurred in the historical development of art, that an era of astonishing creativity lasting perhaps six centuries in the West had come to an end, and whatever art was to be made from then on would be marked by what I was prepared to call a post-historical character.” It is important to note that I consider Danto’s thesis applicable to all the arts – not just painting, but sculpture, poetry, literature, music of all types, dance, film, etc. All have evolved within a historical narrative arc and all have effectively, as the saying goes, finally “jumped the shark.”
To put this theory into more concrete focus, I would like to give a few examples followed by some explanations.
In classical music, meaning the western tradition from the Renaissance through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth (and Twenty-first) centuries, works that most critics, historians and afficionados agree are great, include the obvious – Bach’s preludes and fugues,
[1] Arthur C. Danto – “After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History”
Beethoven’s symphonies, Wagner’s operas, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Bartok’s string quartets, and Schoenberg’s 12 tone works. But while thousands of pieces have been composed since the 1960’s, some interesting, some satisfying, and many bland or just plain annoying, can anybody name one that stands alongside Beethoven’s 9th or Bach’s Mass in B minor or Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3? If they can, I surely haven’t heard it.
In jazz, since the heyday of the revolutionary styles of bebop, post-bop, avant-garde, jazz/world music fusion and jazz/rock fusion which ended essentially in the mid-1970’s, can you name anyone who has come up with a viable new path that could be considered as original and profound as what Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor, or Miles Davis had done? Sure, there are virtuoso players who are a dime a dozen being cranked out of conservatories from Berklee to USC’s Thornton School, but what original styles that could comprise a new chapter in the history of jazz have any of them created?
In rock music, after the 1960’s, which extended into the early ‘70’s, what great bands or solo artists have emerged aside from a few rare examples like the Police, U2, and the great Brazilian MPB artists like Milton Nascimento, Ivan Lins, Djavan, Gal Costa and Marcos Valle (and those were back in the ‘80’s.) Instead of musicians who have studied the success of the Beatles and other great bands, popular music has, in recent years, been reduced to a cesspool of angry rap/hippity hop to the barbershop ranters and chorusline Vegas-style strippers in their underwear performing choreographed dance routines while some attractive Playboy centerfold-type woman sings forgettable songs for adoring hoards.
In visual art, insofar as what I’ve observed in museums and galleries, only Anselm Kiefer and a couple others could stand up to masters like Vermeer, Monet, Dali or Rothko. There hasn’t even been an actual art “movement” since the oddly named “neo-expressionist” movement of the ‘80’s, and most of that was garbage that only gained notoriety due to the booming economy of the “Go-Go ‘80’s” when people were making money hand over fist and decided to make the collecting of crappy new art a trendy must-have as a backdrop for them to snort cocaine in the Hamptons until their nasal passages collapsed. In subsequent years, the best description anyone could come up with was what is known as “Pluralism.” It’s a term that means exactly what it says – that there is no recognizable avant-garde movement such as were Realism, Impressionism, Futurism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Surrealism or Photorealism.
In dance, many of the modern works I’ve seen appear to be seasoned, toned athletes performing chaotic, silly, amateurish pieces. None to me, exceed the earlier works of Ailey, Taylor, Limon, Graham or Duncan. I have yet to see a brilliant ballet break out that is on the level of Swan Lake or Giselle.
Films have degenerated from the great, thought-provoking so-called “art films” of Goddard, Antonioni, Fellini and Bergman and Hollywood films such as the Godfather Trilogy, Citizen Kane, and the Graduate to a cesspool of zombie and super hero films that are devoid of any acting or interesting plot and rely only on phony-looking special effects employed manically to suit the tastes of those with the attention span of a chipmunk. A few exceptions have managed to squeeze through like The Green Room, Perfect Days and Parasite, but those are few and far between.
In literature, where are the great novels that are on the level of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Joyce, Steinbeck, Mishima, or even Bellow and Updike? Granted, I enjoy the novels of Shteyngart and Murakami very much but where are the grand, sweeping, psychologically penetrating works?
For the answer to these questions, I would like to submit the following theories:
Finite Structural Limitations
Technological Decentralization of Authority
Shift in Economic and Geographic Paradigm
Technological Shift in Human Thought Structure
The Institutional Shift from Meritocracy to Wokeness
Finite Structural Limitations
In all art forms, there are a finite number of tools to work with and a finite limit to what the human mind comprehends as pleasing to the eye, ear or mind, and over the past centuries, so much has already been done and so many combinations of material have already been explored and utilized. For instance, in music, at least in Western music, there are only 12 tones in the scale. So many combinations have been used in creating chords, chordal sequences, melodies, harmonies and rhythms as well. After so many combinations have already been used, at most new works end up sounding either derivative, irritating or boring. In listening to something being done since 1980, would you rather listen to it or to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Ornette Coleman, Bud Powell, Stravinsky or Sibelius?
In order to create art, themes need to be created, be it melodic phrases, rhythmic groupings, characters, plots, colors, arrangement of forms on a surface, etc. How does one come up with a new plot for a book or an opera or chord sequence or subject matter for a song that has never been used that manages to sound or look fresh and amazing? It’s a tall task.
Generally speaking, the arts have evolved from simple, formulaic structures to more abstract, complex and unpredictable ones. In music, one could see it from Haydn and Mozart evolving up to Bartok and Schoenberg, early Coltrane up to late Coltrane, and early Beatles love songs to Revolver and beyond. In visual art, one could see it from Raphael evolving up to Pollack and Smithson. And in dance, classic Petipa ballets evolving up to modern dance choreographies. Novels can be traced from Gogol and Tolstoy to Joyce and Pynchon.
Employing this paradigm of development, an end time, or termination point can be seen. Back in the 70’s or 80’s, I recall reading an interview with pianist Paul Bley who mentioned that Cecil Taylor had taken jazz improvisation to its logical end point, leaving no room for any further advancement in that modality. In classical music, Schoenberg’s 12 tone system pretty much did that as well, leaving only compositions that employed a mixture of 12 tone writing and other tonal palates. Later on, systems such as Spectral music emerged, yet while it challenged the ear with some interesting tonal colorings, none of it could be considered to be masterworks. In visual art, the very meaning of art became challenged in the early 20th century by Marcel Duchamp. About half a century later, Andy Warhol further extended that enquiry with his satirical pop creations, as well as who I would argue was even more profound, Piero Manzoni who really initiated the conceptual art movement, or as the critic Lucy Lippard put it, “the dematerialization of the art object.” Art became reduced to a concept, only recognized as such by the artist’s documentation of it. You can’t evolve any further than art being reduced to an idea – nearly a manifestation of Plato’s ideal. This was the most demonstrably defining movement that manifested the end of art’s evolution.
In painting, the rich tradition from even prehistoric times through the 1970’s that has incorporated so many styles, movements and periods has left little room to create something that is neither derivative nor awful. There are only so many things you can do on a flat surface:
Landscapes, portraits, still lifes, abstractions, message works, minimal works, conceptual work, and only so many media – oil paint, acrylic, latex, ink, crayon, pencil, charcoal, water color, gouache, pastels, tempra, etc. And only so many surfaces on which to paint – canvas, poster board, fiber board, chipboard, wood, paper, plastic, glass, etc. Even mixed media has long ago been taken to the extreme by artists from Man Ray to Robert Rauschenberg. Every media has also been utilized in sculptural applications like wood, metal, plaster, clay, fibers, stone, paper, found objects, and even light. Not only have so many different media been employed but done so in millions of varieties going back thousands of years. One can view art from the past ranging from ancient to northern Europeans like Bosh and Brueghel, to Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists to find art that looks more risky and exciting than most works being created since the 1970’s. The question remains, where do you go from there?
The End of the Avant-Garde
Avant-Garde, a term that refers to any artist, movement, or artwork that breaks with precedent and is regarded as innovative and boundaries-pushing. It generally implies something that is ahead of its time in which eventually the existing status quo will catch up to and accept as standard tradition for its time. Throughout history, you can see it played out in a dialectical process as part of historical evolution. Renaissance painting was avant-garde in relation to flatted Medieval painting. Courbet’s genre painting was avant-garde in breaking with the religious and historical painting that existed. Impressionism’s fragmentation of light was avant-garde in breaking with the existing realism.
Music followed the same path from the jazz evolution from Armstrong to Lester Young to Bebop and post-bop to the free jazz of the 1960’s. Rock progressed from Elvis to the Beatles to Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer to Steely Dan. Blues progressed from acoustic delta music to electric Chicago blues to white kids from Chicago to London playing virtuoso versions of it. Classical progressed from Baroque to Classical to Romantic to the freer styles of Bartok and Stravinsky, and finally to 12 Tone Serial Music.
So much had been done in experimenting and pushing boundaries in the Arts that there simply is no place for an artist or movement to go that could break with any established precedent. You could listen to someone with wild, fists cascading across a piano keyboard and simply yawn knowing that Cecil Taylor already did it 65 years ago and Henry Cowell did it over 100 years ago. What is more avant-garde than what John Cage did? In visual arts, everything’s been done at least a half a century ago from slashed canvases, solid monochrome canvases to no canvases at all – just philosophical concepts. In 1980, I was involved in the wildest free-dance events imaginable up in Woodstock, NY at the Creative Music Studio.
In sum, the avant-garde has ceased being a movement that breaks with tradition by pushing boundaries. For the most inventive boundary- pushing Arts, one paradoxically must look back in time – a long time when there was still inventive, seemingly outrageous things left to try. Once all of that had been done, there was nowhere left to go. Thus, there is no more avant-garde in the true, historical sense of the term, but rather it has become emblematic of a series of past periods culminating in the 1960’s and finding its final resting spot in the 1970’s.
Technological Decentralization of Authority
The system or model in which art, music, literature and other cultural creations are communicated to the public has shifted drastically with the advent of the computer and internet. In the past, visual art, at least in post-royal patron renaissance times, has gone through such institutions as salons, galleries and museums – the final resting place being either in a museum’s collection or in the hands of a private collector who initially came upon the work when it was displayed in a gallery.
In music, at least beginning in the mid-20th century, it was communicated to the public via radio, television, record stores, magazines, newspapers and live concerts. Disc jockeys would largely determine what music got played predicated on their own taste, what they thought the public would want to listen to (commercially viable), and on how much payola they received from the record companies to feature their songs. When you walked into a record store, the albums they wanted you to buy the most would be featured in racks in the front below large signs proclaiming “New Releases!” This way, whether the music was good or bad, everyone knew who the big groups or solo artists were. In addition, in the record bins, a finite amount of albums were carried by the store, including many esoteric works that one would only hear on college radio stations or certain festivals.
In literature, bookstores would feature the latest books in the same manner as record stores featured new records with stacks of them on a table or rack when you first walked in. Books would be reviewed in magazines and newspapers and people would share their recommendations with others via word of mouth, which is how everyone of my generation read a copious amount of books by Vonnegut and Hesse. Even teachers in high school and college would discuss popular books. People would go to libraries and take out books.
With the advent of the internet, all of that has changed, not that it has changed completely, but significantly enough to infer a major paradigm shift, to quote Thomas Kuhn. For the most part, both record stores and bookstores have disappeared and gone the way of dinosaurs. With record stores, first records began vanishing and were replaced by CDs, which had no surface noise and could play for twice as long, and be programed for several to be played in a row, but lacked the warmth and audio realism of an LP. Later, even CD’s began disappearing to be replaced by online streaming which had even less audio fidelity. With music you can click on your computer, why is a store needed? In addition, any physical copies anyone wanted could be accessed by either ordering online from sites like Amazon or Discogs, or burned onto one’s own CDs from youtube using software like Audacity. Yet what was lost was the experience of going into Tower Records or J&R and browsing around through stacks to find gems. Since there were no stores any longer, nor even record companies that would take a chance on a musician and record and promote their work, musicians began recording their own music and displaying it on websites.
When it comes to painting and sculpture, physical galleries began disappearing, often replaced by high end boutiques and restaurants, and like musicians, artists began displaying their works on websites.
With bookstores disappearing and people only going into the few remaining ones to buy greeting cards with cats on them, writers also began displaying their works on websites and in ebooks for people to download or read online.
What was left from all this conversion to digital media was a decentralization of “authority,” meaning a common understanding of what is important and of high quality. The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, Doc Watson’s Vanguard recordings and Miles Davis’s Columbia recordings have authority on major labels and possess a commonly held agreement that they are high quality, important statements within their fields. A few kids playing guitars and drums in their parents’ basement who maybe get a few gigs in a downtown club or even a slot at the end of a late night TV talk show do not have this authority and are only known to their friends and a few local kids and maybe a few stray folks who managed to find them online among the millions of others who presented themselves the same way.
The same can be said for authors and visual artists who have to rely on somebody finding them online, or pay copious amounts of money to SEO experts in order to facilitate people to come across their websites. Without any common understanding of greatness, like Hemmingway, Faulkner, Nabokov, Coltrane, Jarrett, the Byrds, the Hollies, Rothko, Ernst, Nureyev, Kirkland, Szell or Heifetz, artists have now become reduced to being but paper messages in a bottle floating in the cyberspace version of the Pacific Ocean.
Shift in Economic and Geographic Paradigm
One of the most dramatic changes in the late 20th century has been the rising cost of living. Wages have not nearly increased as much as the cost of real estate, rent, food, transportation, education, clothing, utilities, and pretty much everything else. In the post-war era, America was being essentially rebuilt with the GI Bill, the construction of the highway system and the dominance of American steel mills, automotive and aircraft industries, paint, chemicals, agriculture and just about everything else. The baby boomers on the whole, went to college, had money to spend, leisure time and flourished in a renaissance of expansive music, art, literature, eastern religions and to their detriment, drugs. Most important, rent was cheap.
Due to the conditions described above, young, creative people were able to migrate to major urban areas, especially New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London, while a built-in situation presented itself in Chicago due to the prior migration of blacks from the south to Chicago’s south and west sides. In places like Greenwich Village, an aspiring rock guitarist could get an apartment for $50/month and live on the same floor as talented folksingers, jazz musicians, classical musicians, dancers, painters, writers, comedians, actors and of course, other rock musicians. Everyone knew each other and there were bountiful venues in which to perform. A fruitful cross-pollination took place and it was easy for people to find others sharing their same interests and aspirations. In this rarified atmosphere, bands were formed, artists, poets and actors were able to exchange ideas and many were able to gain exposure from copious media coverage, including self-established “underground” papers such the Village Voice. Smaller versions of the Village, Laurel Canyon, Toronto’s Yorkville, Haight-Ashbury and London formed in many cities across the country. In my hometown of Cleveland, the Coventry area as well as the Case Western Reserve area assumed that mantle. In many of these towns, as well as areas around college campuses, creative folks who cut their teeth there and honed their skills then took their talents to the bigger cities of New York, LA and SF.
Not long after those halcyon days, those $50/month flats became $3500/month flats. Even the New York Times admitted that “The number of artists living in the city has declined….Almost 50 arts venues have closed in the past five years.” They go on to state that “New York’s creative sector has shrunk as the cost of living has soared” New York City became a playground and shopping mall for millionaires and billionaires (to trumpet Bernie Sanders’ mantra!). Even college kids who used to pay a couple of hundred bucks for a semester of education now were strapped with six figure obligations, and a prospect of jobs that paid peanuts compared to the cost of rent in those aforementioned, formerly creative hubs. So what we were left with were two salient dynamics: Since the arts generally paid peanuts, artists had to concentrate their energies on fields that could afford them a living such as engineering, computer science and other tech fields, law, medicine, or Wall Street-type investment-related fields. All neighborhoods became too expensive for artists to live in. The obvious solution to that problem of affordability was to not try and live in one of those cities and instead, live in less expensive places such as Ohio, the Carolinas, Texas, Florida, or whatever other city they grew up in. What you were left with was a decentralized artistic world invested with limited interaction between other like-minded folks who were left with only isolated, parochial small markets in which to ply their wares with no viable means of expanding their exposure other than someone finding the bottle their message happened to be in, washed up on a shore. Youtube or their website. Messages in a bottle.
One other economic dynamic reared its ugly head: In the beginning of popular music, the record company executives, or “suits,” as they were known, were only familiar with music from their generation, such as Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. They had no clue as to what the Beatles, the Stones or Dylan were about, but they knew that kids loved them and were rushing to buy their records and buy tickets to see them in concert. Since they didn’t understand anything about them, they figured, the more the merrier, and began to sign anyone with long hair and mod clothes, hoping they too would bring in the dough. As Frank Zappa put it, “One thing that did happen in the 60s was some music of an unusual and experimental nature did get recorded, did get released.” The executives of the day were “cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’” According to Zappa, the old suits tried to get smart and hired young businessmen figuring they would understand what kids wanted to hear. Instead, they tried to manufacture acts they thought kids should want to hear, and began to compartmentalize music into convenient labels for marketing purposes. That was the beginning of popular music’s downfall. As Zappa continued, “We were better off with those guys than we are with the hip, young executives making decisions about what people should hear. The hippies are more conservative than the conservative ‘old guys’ ever were.” Thus, music shifted from being a creative art that was captured and presented to the public for appreciation to being a prefabricated product slickly marketed for nothing other than profit.
This same process began to take place not long after in the art world as well as with books. Gallery owners and book publishing companies began looking for specific styles of works that they thought would sell, and artists and writers, in order to make money, conformed their efforts to meet those styles. It was more about money than substance. I remember back in the 1980’s or ‘90’s, meeting up with a fellow I knew from back in high school who became an A&R man for Atlantic Records in NYC. I came to him with a tape of my jazz group to see about getting a recording contract. He filled me in on the business of his business, which is signing artists for record deals. All demos sent to him go immediately into the trash – unopened. His job is to promote rap music and sign the most popular rap shouters on the scene. His only challenge is bidding against other record companies to be able to sign and promote these talentless imbeciles. By dumbing down music to its lowest common denominator – vocals and a beat, and selling it with big corporate muscle to the undiscerning masses as aesthetic authority, both the suits and the unsavory thugs walk away with millions.
In the art gallery and book publishing worlds, the paradigm is exactly the same. I know for a fact that the standard modus operandi for galleries is to return the slides and resumes sent by artists without even looking at them, with an accompanying bullshit form letter that says something to the effect that they’re going in a different direction or their schedule is already filled up for the next few years. What they really mean is, the submitting artists aren’t already famous enough to bring in revenue for them. Most book publishers will not even accept any new manuscripts and those that will, will only accept them from an agent. Of course as the scam goes, most agents will not even look at manuscripts submitted by authors who aren’t already famous or doing something within a proven commercial formula.
The art critic Donald Kuspit [2] has written extensively about the degradation of the aesthetic experience at the expense of indifferent economic greed. As Kuspit put it, “Art may be indeterminate, but money has the power to determine what is art.” The great artists of the pre-1980’s historical continuum believed in the transcendent eternal aesthetics of art. Beginning in the 1960’s, Andy Warhol came up with the idea of art as solely a commodity with no relation to aesthetic value. Eventually, a couple decades later, that philosophy became the mainstream norm. Kuspit writes, the art world “can no longer envision a world that is not run like a business, that is, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing is priceless.”
Don’t get me wrong, every record company, gallery and book publishing company has a right and a vital need to make money, but there is a way to accomplish that at the same time as providing a platform for quality works of art. That way is to maintain a stable of proven moneymakers while also bringing in new talent to expose the public to. By doing so, some of the new, unknown talent will become known and even surprise them by gaining popularity and thus providing additional income. But greed has prevented that and the more money they can take in, even at the expense presenting any quality art, they will keep pursuing. For them, there is never enough. Unbridled corporate greed.
Technological Shift in Human Thought Structure
After the 1970’s, the aforementioned points that I presented began taking effect until the early 21st century when a newly introduced factor captured the world’s imagination – the cell phone. Coupled with the cell phone, and began a bit earlier even was the popularization of the video game. These technological gadgets rapidly metamophosized from innocent diversionary games for kids and convenient communication devices for use when one was away from home to and epidemic of addictive activity that took no backseat to heroin or cocaine. They turned the world into a band of hypnotized zombies, like something out of a horror movie. Instead of playing with their friends, exploring the outdoors, using their imaginations and reading books, kids imprisoned themselves in their basements or bedrooms playing video games. And parents became their enablers. As they grew up, they became sleepwalking palm zombies starring at God knows what on their phones instead of going to art museums, galleries, concerts, forming bands, reading books, acting in plays, writing poetry or any other creative activity that would have been normal (and healthy) in previous decades. As a consequence, grade scores in schools of all levels have plummeted and teachers have enabled the kids to continue on as ignorant morons without failing them and making them repeat a grade until they learn the course material. According to the New York Times, “Twelfth grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools are reporting difficulties in getting students to
engage with lengthy or complex texts.” It goes on to say that for students, even reading a book can seem like a “daunting hurdle!” What hope is there for the arts to survive when the majority of the public know nothing of Bach, Coltrane, Spirit, Motherwell, Soutine, Baryshnikov, Ailey, Bulgakov, Mishima, Lowell, Creeley, Kerouac, or even what the three branches of government are in the United States? In order to appreciate something that’s good, one needs the intellectual capacity to be able to discern its value. As was the case in the pre-1980’s culture, many musical, visual and literary achievements were celebrated by mass culture. While I’m not suggesting that all or any of the above could be considered “mass culture,” much of what was celebrated as such were of appreciable quality such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, van Gogh, Picasso, da Vinci, Hemmingway, Steinbeck and Nabokov. The use of cell phones and computer-generated information has reduced the attention span and intellectual capabilities of people – especially younger ones, to that of a fruit fly. Acting as enablers, many universities no longer even assign books to read! All they deem possible for students to absorb are excerpts. Without delving into detailed statistical proof of this thesis, suffice it to say that there has been a demonstrable technological shift in human thought structure that has significantly lessened the potential of anyone making any breakthrough contributions to the Arts.
The Institutional Shift from Meritocracy to Wokeness
The “Wokeness Movement” as a social construct began roughly around the time of George Floyd’s death. Floyd was a career criminal with a long rap sheet that included theft, cocaine possession and dealing, aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, as well as minor crimes like trespassing, and served a 5 year stint in prison. Somehow, aided by the dearth of brain power as I articulated in the previous section, this unsavory thug became a folk hero to the political far left that ignited a social movement that aided in getting the despicable Donald Trump elected. Almost overnight, the concept of victimization became a badge of honor to which reparations must be paid.
This arguably hit the cultural world the hardest as the gatekeepers, i.e. gallery and museum curators, record company executives, publishers, newspaper and magazine publishers, etc., widely bought into this movement wholeheartedly. The result, unfortunately, was the dilution of artistic quality. Lesser works were by so-called minorities such as blacks, Asians, Indians, women and Hispanics were represented at the expense of higher quality works by white men. Art, music and literature that had always been a meritocracy – one that did not exclude James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Jacob Lawrence, Helen Frankenthaler, Katia Kollwitz, Carlos Santana, or Wilfredo Lam, transformed itself into a one that acted as if third-rate works were now the cream of the crop. Far more qualified works by white men were suddenly excluded or only allowed in on a quota basis. Can you imagine this being done in other facets of life such as sports, finance, politics or education?
Currently, approximately 70% of players in the NBA are black while about 17% are white. Can you imagine what would happen if the league made a rule to reverse those percentages? The players didn’t get chosen because they were black. They got chosen because they were the best players. The same goes for CEOs of corporations, investment firms, university professors and military generals. Only in the Arts could institutions get away with such nonsense, and given the fact that the masses are uneducated in music, art or literary history or practical application, they will blindly go along with an patronize anything they are told they are supposed to like. In a recent visit to the National Gallery in Washington D.C., I shockingly observed two portraits of women side by side on a wall. One was a beautifully rendered painting by Robert Henri that reminded me of John Singer Sargent’s treatment. Next to it was a painting of a black woman that looked like it was done by a third grader, done by a black artist. It didn’t even look to be intentionally bad as an “Art Brut” work by Jean DuBuffet. It was just jaw-droppingly bad, and to put it on the wall of a storied museum at all, much less next to a gorgeous Henri work shows the road of cultural evolution speeding directly into a solid brick wall.
In sum, due to Finite Structural Limitations, Technological Decentralization of Authority, Shift in Economic and Geographic Paradigm, Technological Shift in Human Thought Structure and The Institutional Shift from Meritocracy to Wokeness, very few artistic works of merit have been produced from the time of the last couple decades of the 20th century through today (the 2020’s), and given those factors, there is little chance that Art will continue to evolve. The way things are looking, with the newest shiny object in the room – AI, it looks as if humans will only evolve to become less human – quasi-robots if you will. The essence of Art is humanization – human expression which teaches us more about ourselves and our environment. Our present, past and imagination of the future. It lays bare the soul and provides both questions and meaning to our collective consciousness as well as unconsciousness. Living in a future of unfeeling robots will be one I’ll be glad to not be a part of. As Art has apparently hit a dead end, it will later drag humanity down with it. Music, films, painting, sculpture, literature and poetry will continue to be made, at least for a while and will no doubt appeal to the generations that have produced it, as well as everyone else who stands to reap monetary profit from them, but it is highly doubtful that we’ll see anything as culturally and qualitatively significant as that done by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Brahms, Beethoven, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Rothko, Rembrandt, Picasso, Melville, Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Kubrick, Scorsese or Antonioni.
[2] Donald Kuspit – The End of Art