The Absolute Truth about Contemporary Art 
BY PETER PLAGENS
 
s you get older, in the art world as
elsewhere, you’re confronted with
some choices about how to
conduct yourself. You can, for instance,
stay locked in the style you strutted when
you were younger and hipper—that is,
continuing to wear a ponytail and tight
cowboy shirts with mother-of-pearl
buttons long after you’ve gone bald on
top and acquired a gut. Or you can try to
keep up with today’s younger people by
copying their fashions: Shave your head,
wear small, expensive blue Italian
sunglasses and a shiny suit over a black Tshirt
and try to blend in with the
30something critics and curators. Or you
can just give up altogether on trying to
wax contemporary—and wear bow ties,
tweed jackets with elbow patches, and
take your proud place as a naysayer who
thinks that this time the art world really
has gone to hell in a handbasket.
I find myself thinking about this stuff
lately because I’m now 67[[68, if this is
published after March 1, 2009]]—an age I
seem to have reached suddenly, and
quite unjustly, overnight. I realize that I
entered the art world, with a newly
minted MFA degree, almost 45 years ago.
Back then, an artist as mature as I am
now would have entered the art world
in—Omigod!—the 1920s! Which is to
say: The art world in which I now find
myself is as different from the one that I
entered as the one that I entered was
from the art world in the days of the
Calvin Coolidge Administration.
Although such early American modernist
artists as Arthur Dove, John Marin and
Georgia O’Keeffe were already prominent
in fairly small circles in the 1920s, the
American equivalents of the saccharine
French academic painter William
Bouguereau were much more the typical
fare in gallery exhibitions. And the most
prominent American art critic was Royal
Cortissoz, who wrote that “Modernism is
of precisely the same heterogeneous alien
origin [as the flood of recent immigrants]
and is imperiling the republic of art in the
same way. … Such movements [are]
crude, crotchety, tasteless, abounding in
arrogant assertion, making a fetich [sic] of
ugliness and, above all else, rife in
ignorance of the technical amenities.
These movements have been promoted
by types not yet fitted for their first
papers in aesthetic naturalization—the
makers of true Ellis Island art.”
I’m a dedicated modernist and I’m
certainly no nativist. But I am a negativist
by temperament, and experience has
confirmed that 90 percent of what’s
offered for sale by the galleries today is
bad art, and that 90 percent of the art
offered for viewing by museums isn’t
nearly as good as their press releases say
it is. Although my reasons for thinking
this are wildly different from Cortissoz’s
condemnation of modernism, I have, over
the last 20 years or so, written about the
deleterious effects on contemporary art of
pervasive irony, the unfortunately
increasing overlap of art and superficial
A
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entertainment in gallery offerings, the
preening confluence of art and the
runway fashion industry, and even the
morphing of call-it-like-you-see-it art
criticism in more or less plain language
into theoretical, judgment-averse “post-
criticism.”
When I started writing reviews for
Artforum in Los Angeles in 1965, in my
mid-twenties, I was harder on the art
than most of the other contributors. To
this day, I see the flaws in art first, and
have a tendency immediately to “argue”
with art instead of letting it wash over me
first. Also contributing to my critical
dyspepsia is the fact that I’m an artist and
a critic. I play on both sides of the street
and may, occasionally, fall victim to
conflicts-of-interest, express and implied.
Finally, in an art world—if not an entire
culture—devoted to youth, to
“emerging” artists, I collect Social
Security. Although I’ve tried mightily not
to act like a cranky ol’ eminence grise and
to remain as colloquial (even as wise-ass)
as I can, I still sometimes fear that I’m
doomed to repeat the perennial cycle of
sinking into circle-the-wagons artistic
conservatism as I age.
With that confessional prologue in hand,
let’s take a look at how the art world*
has changed since I got into it. Let’s
consider three different art worlds: the
“Old Art World” of 1964, the “Changed
Art World” of circa 1979, and the “New
Art World” of more or less now. In the
Old Art World, the typical young,
ambitious artist was a white male with an
MFA in painting or sculpture. He prided
himself on sheer time spent in the studio
and what he wanted most in his work
were integrity and consistency; he
wanted his work—at least consciously—
to express his deepest feelings and
esthetic principles without catering to an
audience or market. His heroes were
grizzled old modernist bastards, guys like
Stuart Davis and David Smith, who’d
wrestled Cubism into a kind of
abstraction and made of it something
pragmatically American. Conversation
with his artist-buddies was about what
was going on during all those hours they
spent in their studios. He read the art
magazines and took practically every
word in them all too seriously.
Our typical young artist ca. 1964 wanted
to be able to move to New York so he
could expose his work to some influential
critics. His idea of really “making it” was
to be able to earn a modest living off his
work without having to hold an outside
job, and he figured if things went right
with his career he might be able to do it
by age 45. Failing that, he’d settle for a
full-time teaching job at a good art school
or university where he’d be able to teach
good graduate students who wanted to
be artists like he was. But he didn’t want
to be more than three hours’ drive from
New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or
San Francisco. Even if he never got to be
a player in one of those four cities, he’d
be an “artist’s artist,” known for the
“toughness” of his work and, perhaps,
his teaching effect on students who did
go on to make it in the big city.
In the Changed Art World of fifteen or so
years later, our typical young artist had a
B.A. in something other than art—e.g.,
anthropology or philosophy—and had
gotten interested in art by meeting some
artists who came to lecture at his college,
3
or reading art criticism or books on art
theory. He thought, “Hey, I can do this.”
Although our artist was still likely to be a
white male, there were starting to be
more women artists in the art world.
(Even so, for simplicity’s sake I’m going to
keep the pronoun male for a bit longer.)
Our artist leapt beyond Minimalism—that
last gasp of Cubism which reduced it to a
single cube—and made “post-Minimal”
sculpture that emphasized process over
product. He used conspicuously natural
materials (e.g., rocks and earth and sticks
and twigs) or industrial detritus or just
odd combos of material, such as rope and
wax. Much of the time, his work was
militantly impermanent—where materials
were dispersed throughout a gallery to
make an “installation,” rather than joined
together to make an object. It’s primary
aim certainly wasn’t to be beautiful, but
rather intellectually deep (or at least
enigmatic). Our artist’s heroes were
European thinkers who didn’t write
directly about art, but instead said
profound things that could be applied to
making art. Such ideas were what he
talked about with his friends.
Although a university (rather than an artschool)
teaching job would have been
nice, it wasn’t absolutely necessary
because an artist back then could get all
kinds of municipal, state, federal and
foundation grants and fellowships to
make work which, he thought, ought to
be as “unmarketable” as possible
anyway. And being right in a major urban
art center wasn’t as crucial, either, as
long as he could be represented by a
good New York dealer. The dealer had to
be in New York so that the gallery’s
reputation could get him shows in
Europe. The point of his having shows in
Europe wasn’t so much sales as it was for
his improved reputation getting him
invited to do “installations” in museums.
His target age for getting on the
exhibition-and-installation circuit was
before he turned 40, maybe as soon as
35.
In the New Art World of today, the typical
young ambitious artist once more has an
MFA degree. But in order to get career
traction right from the start, it has to be
from a short list of “hot” schools,
especially one of the big three in southern
California: UCLA, CalArts, or Art Center.
Since the artist’s MFA is now probably in
some form of “new media,” his or her
work (our artist is now just as likely to be
female as male) will consist of either some
tricky configuration of projected video, or
retro-Pop-Art objects in some kind of
fancy plastic made on order by a
fabricator. Since all but the most
minimum-wage adjunct teaching jobs are
as scarce as hen’s teeth, and since
government grants to artists are for all
intents and purposes extinct, sales now
count for just about everything. So our
young artist makes work whose point can
be quickly apprehended by peripatetic
collectors. Our artist reads art magazines
again, but pays much more attention to
such web photo-and-gossip web pages as
“Out with Mary” on Artnet.com and
“Scene and Herd” on Artforum.com. A
good dealer is still a must, but the dealer
should be nearly as young and sexy as the
art world wants artists to be. Since
dealers love to say that an artist is
“Atlanta-based,” or “Berlin-based” or
“Croatia-based” or “Paducah-based”
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more than simply “lives in New York” or
“lives in Los Angeles,” our artist can—
once his or her name pops up in a few art
magazines and on enough websites—live
anywhere he or she pleases and (with the
dealer) arrange sales over the Internet.
Our artist talks with friends mostly about
prices and money, and starts to feel the
sour breath of failure on the back of the
neck if he or she hasn’t achieved career
orbit by a year or two after turning 30.
*****
In the Old Art World described above,
what I’ll call “material culture” (art
consisting of stationary physical objects,
live theater, acoustic music performed
live, etc.) may no longer have been a
majority culture, but it was still a
formidable minority. Painting and
sculpture still had some clout in the
general culture. Think Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein or
Don Judd. Today, material culture has
been reduced to an almost quaint,
antiquarian minority when measured
against reproduced or electronic
culture—movies, television, and recorded
music—which in turn has gone digital
and is bulldozing everything in its path.
Whatever clout painting and sculpture
still enjoy in the general culture has to do
with either money (that is, sensationally
high prices) or the artists being “hot”
(that is, photogenic and starting to
command high prices). Except for the
occasional scandal involving the depiction
of sex, or a satire of a religious belief, no
really consequential ideas or philosophical
tenets expressed in an embodied way in a
contemporary painting or sculpture gets
much attention at all. Contemporary
painting or sculpture is all about clever
irony. Think John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage,
or Jeff Koons.
But if the art objects of material culture,
and the artists who make them are
handled adroitly by art dealers—that is, in
close conjunction and synchronization
with the vast trade in luxury goods, a
desire to be in on the latest trends, and
through slick magazines, gossipy art
blogs, Venice-Biennale-type “festival”
exhibitions, cultural tourism, and art trade
fairs (e.g., Art Basel Miami, and The
Armory Show in New York), —artists can
prosper, at least monetarily.
Contemporary art objects can function
quite nicely as high-risk investments (the
cultural equivalent of 1980s junk bonds)
and as ostensible evidence of their
owners’ being hipper, deeper, more
complex people than you might
otherwise have thought they were. The
reason so many showbiz movers and
shakers now so avidly collect
contemporary art is that people making a
lot of money in reproduced or electronic
culture want to prove their chops by
showing they appreciate material
culture—which, down deep, they suspect
is still more profound than the electronic
and reproducible culture in which they
make their sumptuous livings.
Obviously, there’s a boom market right
now in contemporary art—although it
well may collapse in a major recession.
Younger artists take this condition for
granted. They’ve grown up with $2500 or
$3000 being the absolute minimum price
for any serious work of art that isn’t a
very tiny print in a very large edition. They
5
see their peers—the ones who’ve gotten
dealers in big cities, at least—charge midfive-figures
for works in their first gallery
solos. And they’ve seen photographs of
the ways in which artists the likes of
Julian Schnabel, Brice Marden and Jeff
Koons live very, very large. A critic friend
says he recently went to an art fair (the
art world’s version of a boat show) and
dropped in at a gallery’s booth where a
six-foot-by-six-foot painting by the late,
well-regarded abstract painter Ray
Parker—among those in a recently
discovered roll of Parker canvases—was
being shown to a potential buyer. The
painting was in pristine condition on a
new stretcher, and was priced at an
unbelievably low $75,000. The collector,
however, said to the gallery attendant,
“Well, I might be able to enjoy that if I
were poor.”
The new, boom-market art world is also
frenetically international, which, these
days, means not just Euro-American. In
Asia and South America the art market is
also booming. And in the Euro-American
art world (that is, the gallery-andmuseum
network extending from
Berlin—and perhaps farther east, from
Moscow—to as far west as Los Angeles),
galleries and art fairs are wildly interested
in non-Euro-American art, especially by
Asian artists, and specifically by Chinese
artists. Many contemporary Chinese
artists were academically trained in
realistic drawing and painting so that they
could produce propaganda images. With
China going capitalist in its own strange
way—“directed capitalism,” they call it—
these artists have either been freed—or
abandoned, take your pick—to fend for
their entrepreneurial selves. So they’ve
smartly morphed their pictures of Mao
and his loyal followers into a gently
satirical form of Pop-Artified Surrealism
that plays well with Western collectors.
The work is still relatively cheap (although
the more well-known artists are getting
expensive fast) and collecting
contemporary Chinese art gives Western
collectors that heady feeling of being
“ahead of the curve.”
Actually, everybody—artists, dealers,
curators, collectors and, yes, critics—
wants to be “ahead of the curve.” The
desire to be ahead of the curve is a
product of four forces. First is collecting
for investment, collecting with an eye on
buying before the prices go up. Second,
there’s the emphasis on youth, that is
“hot” artists whose greater fame is yet to
come. Third, the vestiges of the idea of
the avant-garde have metastasized into
the wider culture. We (meaning all of us,
not just the art world) have accepted
“avant-garde” as merely a part of the
standard product appeal needed to get
something as banal as a cell phone to
succeed in the marketplace. “Avantgarde”
(a term the late artist Dan Flavin
said “ought to be restored to the French
military where its sense of futility can be
properly appreciated”) became “cutting
edge,” which became merely “edgy”
which has now become, of course,
merely “cool.” Finally, the current art
world operates at a frenzied pace. It used
to be that even insiders got their news
from the monthly art magazines. These
days, insiders check such websites as
Artnet.com and blogs like Tyler Green’s
“Modern Art Notes” on Artsjournal.com
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to be updated daily.
In this today’s art world, art dealers (the
fashionable term is “gallerist”) aren’t
idealist connoisseurs who wait for a good
review or two to send a stray collector or
two their way. They’re sharp, aggressive
and tireless business people taking their
wares from one art trade fair booth to
another, badgering one collector after
another, importuning one curator after
another. Today’s museum curators don’t
stay bent over books and slides in
windowless offices, venturing out only to
check on the condition of, or do esoteric
scholarship on, neglected works in
museum storage. Rather, they’re on the
go in designer clothes, clutching
Blackberrys, visiting those “whereverbased”
artists and trying to figure out
how to gather a show of a group of
artists who aren’t well known enough yet
for a competing institution to be putting
together a group show of them.
All that about the saleability of
contemporary art objects having been
said, going to the art galleries in New
York or L.A. these days is increasingly like
going to an “alternative” film and video
festival with multiple venues. I’d say that
in one out of four galleries I visit on a
round in the Chelsea or Brooklyn gallery
districts, I’m required to go into a
darkened chamber and stand (there’s
usually no seating or very little seating)
and watch a projected film or video for as
long as I can bear it or until my schedule
bids me move on. A culturally
conservative colleague who reviews
books and the occasional movie at
Newsweek once said when I took him
with me to a few galleries, “Face it, Peter,
they all want to direct.”
Sculptor Matthew Barney’s Cremaster
series of films (the final one was three
hours long and included an intermission),
and his recent epic Drawing Restraint 9,
co-starring his partner, the pop singer
Bjork, have just about bridged the gap
between Hollywood cinema—let alone
art-house movies—and the art gallery.
(Actually, I rather like Barney’s films,
although they remind me of such early
Surrealist films as Salvador Dalí’s 1929
silent, Le chien andalou, except for a
bigger budget.) But Barney is not the only
artist working this way. Increasingly, with
artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila from Finland
and the Canadian Stan Douglas, films by
artists shown in art galleries have story
lines that aren’t much more fractured
than those in such recent Hollywood
movies as Crash or Babel or Vantage
Point. The production values aren’t that
much worse, either.
*****
William Wilson, the art critic for the Los
Angeles Times from the 1960s into much
of the 1990s, unironically used the term
“veteran vanguardist” as an adjective
phrase for artists who worked in the vein
of, say, the California abstract painter
Richard Diebenkorn, but were less wellknown.
When Bill used the term, he
meant an artist considerably to the left,
so to speak, of a traditional landscape
painter, but whose work was still quite to
right, so to speak, of deliberately
scandalous “performance art.” Often, the
Diebenkornesque artist was a tenured
college professor having his yearly or
7
biennial gallery show. The term “veteran
vanguardist,” which was a little silly even
back then, would seem completely silly
now. There’s no such thing as a
“vanguardist” because there’s no such
thing as an avant-garde. True, some
artists still push the envelope of what’s
permissible in sexual and political content,
or what’s legal in terms of doing things
on public property, or what’s doable in
terms of technological sophistication and
complexity, or what galleries and
museums will put up with in the way of
physical risk, inconvenience and insurance
liability. But artists doing those sorts of
things is so expected it’s almost
academic.
Contemporary art still isn’t quite
mainstream, however. In terms of cultural
popularity and clout, it doesn’t hold a
candle to movies, TV, pop music, etc.
How many art exhibitions are reviewed
on cable television or National Public
Radio? How many artists does Terri Gross
interview on “Fresh Air”? How many bigtime
artists’ private lives are the subject of
tabloid coverage? Part of this comparative
neglect is due to the fact that—artists’
films, videos and performances
notwithstanding—contemporary art
remains mostly about stationary physical
objects. It attracts a relatively small
audience because viewers have to come
to the art in order to see the original, to
get the effect intended by the artist.
Television and pop music have no
“originals” and come to the viewers and
listeners in endlessly reproducible
versions. And although you still have to
go to the movies in order to see a film on
the big screen, everywhere in America
except perhaps Manhattan, a cineplex is
more nearby than a serious art gallery or
museum.
But part of the comparative neglect also
comes from the fact that contemporary
art still isn’t intended for a large
audience. A contemporary artist doesn’t
want a million people to give him or her a
dollar apiece to look at his or her work.
He or she wants one person to pay a
million dollars to own his or her work.
That being the case, the contemporary
artist—whatever his or her still-sublimated
movie-directing ambitions—isn’t required
to make the work intelligible to a greater
public. Chances are, in fact, that the
collector the artist has abstractly in mind
as a buyer wants the work to look a little
weird and indecipherable. After all, that’s
part of the staying-ahead-of-the-curve
feeling the collector is paying for.
*****
The late French sociologist Jean
Baudrillard said that we Western
urbanites were now living in a
“simulacrum” of reality, rather than
reality itself—that is, in a kind of Disney
World version of Main Street rather than
on Main Street itself. His pronouncements
used to seem kind of wacky—typical
Gallic over-the-top exaggerations which
might contain, at best, a grain or two of
truth. Now they seem rather like a “so
what?” description of our everyday lives,
especially to some of us in the art world.
Back in the mid-1960s, right about the
time I received my MFA degree in that
Old Art World, artists without much
money but with a need for working space
8
started illegally homesteading derelict
manufacturing buildings in downtown
Manhattan. Soon, artists attracted some
pioneer galleries, the galleries attracted a
few bars and cafés, and the cafés
attracted small grocery stores and
delicatessens. The arty “SoHo” was born.
Then it got to be stylish for architects and
lawyers and young bankers to live the
way artists supposedly lived, only with a
few more amenities. What I call the
“imported-beer-ad SoHo” was born.
Rapidly, all but the most successful artists
(or those, like me and my wife, who
found a loft to rent just in time to be
grandfathered in under the protective
“Loft Laws” passed in the late 1960s and
early ‘70s) were priced out, and loft
buildings were converted to fashionable
residences, a lot of them with doormen,
and a couple I know of with
commissioned works of art by wellknown
artists in the lobbies. Sometimes—
with Barney’s films or the British artist
Damien Hirst’s public manipulations of
the fevered market (first, selling a
diamond-encrusted skull for $100 million,
and then raking in $200 million gross by
having Sotheby’s in London auction off
his work instead of selling it through a
gallery)—I get the eerie feeling that I’m
living not so much in a “new” art world
as in a distended simulacrum of one. But
by sticking more and more to painting my
paintings and only occasionally
contributing articles to Newsweek, no
longer suffering a full-time journalist’s
responsibility to try to cover as much of
the art-world waterfront as I can, I am, in
this strange new art world, increasingly
demurring. I see fewer shows, read fewer
reviews, and certainly go to fewer art
parties. In the 1970s, when I was still a
cultural tourist in New York, I visited the
then-abstract painter Jake Berthot (he’s
now a sort of landscapist) in his studio
way downtown on Canal Street. Walking
to his studio, I was fascinated as usual by
the cacophony of posters advertising rock
concerts, nightclub appearances, lectures
and art exhibitions. I said to Jake that it
must be exciting to live in a place where
you can go to all this stuff anytime you
want to. “Oh, I don’t go out much at
all,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “If you
don’t, what’s the point of living in New
York?”
“There’s a big difference,” he answered,
“between not going out because there’s
no place to go and not going out because
you choose not to.” Likewise, the young
artist entering the art world now—as Jake
and I did about 45 years ago—will
eventually enjoy the same realization—
that the choice lies among going out
because everybody else is, holing up in
the boonies where nobody goes out, or
sticking to your guns while smiling wryly
at the teeming hordes.###
* Perhaps I should indicate what I mean by “art
world.” There are, after all, many art worlds.
There’s the whole world of “Western art,” all that
Frederic Remington-like stuff that sells for six
figures in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and
Sedona, Arizona. There’s a whole world of
“classical realism,” headquartered in Minnesota,
in which realist painters of a Poussiniste
persuasion paint, sell, and teach disciples in an
old-fashioned master-apprentice way. There are
the worlds of “outsider art,” of “community
murals,” and so on. For this essay’s purpose, by
“art world” I mean the one that trades in the kind
of modern and contemporary art regularly
reviewed in The New York Times.