Interestingly, Kimball blames the horrid state of modern art on Marcel Duchamp, who no doubt would have hated the show Kimball reviewed. Or maybe he would have found humor in the blatant misunderstanding and insipid imitation of what he tried to do as an artist.
Key quote:
What those folks [Dadaists and surrealists] didn’t know about “challenging” and “subverting” conventional taste and attitudes wasn’t worth knowing. In essentials, they pioneered all the tricks on view in “Wrestle”—the sex, the violence, the tedium, the presentation of everyday objects as works of art. The difference is that Duchamp was in earnest: “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” No wonder he gave up on art for chess. Duchamp mounted a campaign against art and aesthetic delectation. In one sense, he succeeded brilliantly. Only the campaign backfired. Once the aloof and brittle irony of Duchamp institutionalized itself and became the coin of the realm, it descended from irony to a new form of sentimentality. I do not have much time for Marcel Duchamp; in my view his influence on art and culture has been almost entirely baneful; but it is amusing to ponder how much he would have loathed the contemporary art world where all his ideas had been ground-down into inescapable clichés, trite formulas served up by society grandees at their expensive art fêtes in the mistaken belief that they are embarked on some existentially or aesthetically daring enterprise. Perhaps Duchamp, aesthete that he was, would have savored the comedy. I suspect his amour-propre would have caused him to feel nausea, not amusement.
Check out the article -- I think it's relevant to our culture as much as it is to our art.
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Have you taken a look at any of the responses to Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull--which cost $12 million, reportedly, just to fabricate, and will be marketed for a cool $100 million, with buyers lined up to buy? I personally tend to think it's the money that's poisoning the art world, along with the whole notion that art is a "professional" enterprise. This latter is what has been taught in the schools for many years, along with what Kimball decries as critical theory posing as art. For me, the jury is out on the Hirst piece: is it a super-bold critique of art-marketeering, or a sordid example in itself? On the other hand, money aside, it does sound like a fascinating and discomforting look at the ironic relationship between the material values that characterize our culture and the inevitability of death. I'd actually like to see the piece, to be "dazzled" by the theatricality of its presence. Cheers, PaL
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