Arguments concerning art tend to proceed in the following way: two people first discover their disagreement on a given piece; they engage in dialectic of a progressively larger scope; they ultimately find their differences to be of some non-foundational nature; they agree to disagree. This is not always the sequence and relativism is not always the necessary result, but it seems to be the standard. Since the inception of postmodernism, however, the architecture of artistic expression itself has been challenged; the notes decided arbitrarily, the colors painted indistinct, the words shrouded in ambiguity. Must there be colors, sounds, rhythm? Must there be a canvas? Must there be an artist? Does “proper” art even exist?
Moving from generalized abstractions to concrete examples is straightforward: is the serialism of Schoënberg too radical, or do we draw the line at his student John Cage’s out-and-out aleatory? Or must we, as Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted, journey all the way back to Brahms to find anything of value? Is Picasso the final frontier, or do we permit everything up to and including Jackson Pollock? Does Joyce’s Ulysses represent the awakening of modernism, or rather a terminal disease reaching metastasis? It’s an easy escape to do as the relativists do, after all—eschew these questions altogether and endorse an artistic mandate of laissez-faire. This capitulation, exasperating as it can be, does serve as a constructive prelude to the crucial thesis; while it is and always has been difficult to properly define what art is and when it succeeds, it seems somewhat easier to delineate what art isn’t and when it fails.
Examples abound: in Nicaragua, Guillermo Vargas put on exhibit a dog tied to a wall without food, supposedly until the poor creature starved to death. Aliza Shvarts, a senior art student at Yale, repeatedly artificially inseminated herself, induced a miscarriage, and harvested the products of the abortions for use as her final senior project. Some examples have achieved greater fame and longevity; Andres Serrano’s photograph "Piss Christ," first exhibited in 1989, portrayed a crucifix inside a beaker allegedly filled with the artist’s own urine, and remains notorious two decades later.
But is there anything artistic to be admired or appreciated in this lot? Never mind a skill or a beauty—is there even a sense of intellectual courage? And while they have certainly produced their predictable and desired results, has any ever established its use as an expression of creativity? None of these performances demonstrate any of that, nor philosophical insight either. In fact, unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors Goya and Manet, they don’t even set a pretense of artistic ambition at all; these demonstrations are simply hollow manifestations of controversy for their own sake, degenerate mechanisms by which self-important iconoclasts can demonstrate their rebellion. They generally say much more about the performer than the subject of the performance. Unfortunately, this is precisely their point.
Perhaps I am mistaken; perhaps smeared embryos, tortured animals, and debased crucifixes are high art. But then one must admit, the membership of such demonstrations rather debauches the entire party, does it not? These displays serve more reasonably as Reductio ad absurdum arguments for what art is not. Someone, for instance, who doesn’t love Beethoven as I do—or conversely, who loves Chopin as I cannot—at least treads with me a common ground. I can appreciate and acknowledge the gestures of the latter’s Études and Preludes without admitting their transcendence. But as for someone who sees artistic merit in the meaningless vulgarities above? The antithesis of art is not kitsch, apparently, but profanity, and with such a person—one who exalts the profane—I share nothing at all.
