THE VOLCANO'S VISUAL ARTS CRITIC SOUNDS OFF >>>

In 1970 I wrote my graduate thesis. It had the somewhat high-minded title "A Ground for the New Art: An Alternative to the Frame-Pedal Aesthetic."  If you must know, my professor came up with the title and I thought it sounded too academic, but I was proud of the thesis. I became even more proud of it decades later when I read it again and discovered that I had done things that were ahead of my time. Not even realizing it at the time, I had predicted and advocated for post-modern art before there was any such thing. Not that other artists, critics and historians hadn't advocated similar things. There were clear historical precedents from Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Rose, Allan Kaprow and Andy Warhol. But I think I put it all together in a cohesive way that nobody else had.

In a nutshell, my thesis was that the linear development of art history had come to an end and now all schools, styles and trends were equally current and valid and none of the old aesthetic criteria applied. McLuhan has said "art is anything you can get away with," and I thought that was the only basis for judging art that mattered.

It was all about THE IDEA. Nothing else mattered.

As early as 1928 Renee Magritte had painted a picture of a pipe with the title "Cici n'est pas une pip." (French for "This is not a pipe.") The point was that pictures should be judge not for what they look like (a pipe) but for what they are (a painting). That was a revolutionary idea and it established the concept that the "idea" was as important as, if not more important than, the art.

And of course, as everybody knows, Duchamp had made the definitive statement on that idea even earlier, in 1917, when he bought a common urinal from a hardware store and entered it in a juried art exhibit - and wrote a brilliant defense of it when the jurors rejected it and said it was not art.

From there it was a few short steps to Kaprow's happenings and Rauschenberg's erased deKooning to Chris Burden shooting himself in a performance art piece.

In 1970 I championed happenings and performance art and conceptual art of all sorts, and theoretically I still like the idea - but some folks have taken it way too far. The big idea has shrunk and become redundant. Today's art world has proven not only that art is anything you can get away with, but that artists can get away with anything.

My friend Jack recently replied to something I wrote about art with this statement: "I too feel that a painting should be exciting all on its own, and that if it is not, it's a fraud. There used to be, probably still is, this exhibition space in the Railyard in Santa Fe that prided itself on being avant-garde. This is, most of the stuff was splendidly executed bureaucratic crap.  It was the art of the idea.  I called it the art of iteration, because there would be one move but it was repeated in the work ad infinitum, and somehow this was taken to be revelatory and far-seeing. A ladder in which all the rungs were gleaming sharp blades, for example.  Okay, kind of cute at first, but once you get the concept, which takes less than a second, there's nothing more to see."

Ah, what monsters have we created? 

I'm all for the clever idea, but when Jeff Koons - as just one of many examples - displayed basketballs and vacuum cleaners and called them art it was just a warmed-over repeat of what Duchamp did with his "Fountain" of 1917. The idea is important, but as my friend Jack said, there needs to be something more to look at.