The death of modern art.(Brief Article)

A few years ago, when I was married to a charming, wealthy woman, we went around our town shopping for a house. Virtually all of the homes the realtors dragged us through were large, expensive, even historic, owned by doctors, lawyers, executives, and their upper-income brethren. I was shocked, though, to see what they had on their walls: mostly nothing except, by order of frequency, airbrushed yearbook photos of their kids, copper wall "pieces" of sailboats, fabric "landscapes" and similar banalities, various "folk art" objects constructed 20 minutes before sale, and some desultory museum posters. I don't remember seeing a single real painting.

I was dismayed by the sheer lack of interest in art. So many serious, professional people dwelling, despite the market value of their homes, in a sort of domestic squalor. The absence of art seemed to occur, I noticed, in proportion with the dissolution of families--a lot of these houses were on the market due to divorce. It was obvious, too, that all the discretionary spending money of these households had gone into cars, electronic gadgetry, computer paraphernalia, and other toys. But something else is also dear: Few people are moved enough by the art produced today to want it in their homes.

In our time, art no longer resides much in the upper-middle-class household. Where is it found instead? Well, in corporate boardrooms (though it is ironic that the executives who toil for these corporations usually live in expensive homes devoid of contemporary art). And in museums. Plus the art departments of universities that train museum managers. Art as a vocation having marched off into the metaphysical ether over the last century, art ownership has become a hermetic activity, not a popular enthusiasm.

To expect the people of one time to behave like people of another time may be silly. The American industrial plutocrats who bought Old Masters by the shipload hung paintings of the anguished Christ on the walls of their mansions for reasons far different from what the artists of 1573, or their patrons, may have had in mind. In many nineteenth-century bourgeois homes, paintings were a somewhat elevated form of decor, one-of-a-kind works, executed within certain technical conventions, for invoking beauty and truth in small doses. Truth and beauty are powerful forces, and middle-class people busy removing spleens and probating estates can only be expected to absorb so much of them in their leisure time.

But over recent decades, art has altogether forsaken the invocation of beauty and truth as a governing objective. In the train wreck of culture and authority that the twentieth century represented, all the previous sortings of human meaning were abandoned, smoking in the ditch of history; what we have been left with is a trade in debris. That a lot of modern art looks like debris is therefore relevant--I am thinking specifically now of a Whitney Museum biennial exhibition of the 1990s, which included one "piece" that was a gigantic blob of fabricated plastic vomit, of the ...