Jerry Saltz is a great writer. At times, he’s a decent thinker. But he imagines himself engaged in a titanic battle with art-flipping philistines debasing great art. Nevermind that most art from any era is mediocre and that all styles that are in vogue breed popular figures who don’t live up to the test of time. In Saltz’s melodrama, he’s all that stands between the vulgarians (who naturally all seek him out to bless their chosen mediocrities) and the unsuspecting collectors who lack Saltz’s superior eye. In today’s example, it’s Walter Robinson’s brilliantly-coined Zombie Formalism which only exists because of the market and the flippers.

After paragraphs of complaining that “Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical,” Saltz softens:

I’ll admit that I don’t hate all of this work. Frankly, I like some of it. The saddest part of this trend is that even better artists who paint this way are getting lost in the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks and more like going to chain stores where everything looks familiar. My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art market again, the bottom will fall out of this genericism. Everyone will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one remembers asking—and it will never be talked about again.

That last statement could apply to just about any genre. Eventually everyone stops painting in a style when the original provocation is no longer relevant. Buried within Saltz’s fairly commonplace screed (he’s not saying much here that Robinson didn’t say weeks ago) is another culprit:

Almost everyone who paints like this has come through art school. Thus the work harks back to the period these artists were taught to lionize, the supposedly purer days of the 1960s and 1970s, when their teachers’ views were being formed. Both teachers and students zero in on this one specific period; then only on one type of art of this period; then only on certain artists. It’s art-historical clear-­cutting, aesthetic monoculture with no aesthetic biodiversity. This is not painting but semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s work, recently called “established postmodern praxis.”

That’s not a bad line of thinking. Certainly it is more interesting than the warmed-over complaints about art made for art fairs. And that observation reminds us again that Jerry Saltz actually does have something to say until he remembers that all modern ills stem from art sales and he’s right back attacking the auction houses and the market.

Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same? (Vulture)

NPR delves into some interesting social scientific research that’s been floating around about the role of peer influence on aesthetic values. In other words, do we value the best art because of its inherent qualities or do some works gain popularity through external forces?

Let’s put that more concretely: Is the Mona Lisa famous because it is the greatest expression of artistic genius or did the theft and publicity surrounding the search for the stolen painting at the turn of the 20th century have something to do with its worldwide stature?

Princeton’s Matthew Salganik tried to answer that with an experiment:

“To see the role of chance you need to see multiple realizations of the same process,” Salganik explains. “But we only get to see one outcome. So we see the world where the Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings, and it’s hard to imagine that something different could have happened.”

But Salganik is good at computers, so he came up with a plan.

He would create a series of identical worlds online filled with the same pieces of art, then get thousands of people to choose which they liked best.

If the same art rose to the top of every world, then he would know that success was driven by the inherent qualities of that work. If not, he could conclude, success was essentially random.

“We have the chance of really seeing — as much as we possibly can — parallel versions of history. So rather than trying to argue like that, we just said, ‘Let’s just create these parallel worlds and see what happens.’ “

So … what happened? As you can imagine, the results favored chance over inherent quality:

after this work, which one person in the field described as a seminal paper, Salganik went on to do similar studies with parallel worlds that suggest that quality does have at least a limited role. It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn’t is essentially a matter of chance.

Good Art Is Popular Because It’s Good. Right? (NPR)

There are many who won’t care for Roger Scruton’s aesthetic politics or for his politics, for that matter. But none can gainsay his skill as a writer. Herein, Scruton takes to what seems to be a new Forbes habit and asks about Clement Greenberg’s famous distinction between Avant-garde and kitsch. Scruton is not much of a modernist. Nonetheless, he charts an interesting arc away from representation and back again without encountering the dreaded kitsch.

Paradoxically, Scruton reminds us, that prepared the ground for kitsch in a new form:

There was, for Greenberg, no way back to the old figurative ways of painting. All the images had been deprived of their aura, and if you attempted, in the world of the 1930s, to paint a beautiful nude in the manner of Ingres, then the result would be kitsch. The only way forward was the way of the avant-garde, which either eschewed representation altogether, or presented figures that had been, as it were, discomposed and reassembled, like those faces of Picasso that look forwards and sideways at once, or those figures of de Kooning that seem to have been slapped on the canvas as a punishment, and then eaten alive by the paint.

For half a century or more Greenberg’s view was orthodoxy. To be a modern artist you had to turn your back on the literal image, since the very attempt to produce traditional art would turn oil-paint to candy-floss and emotion to kitsch. You must go forward with the avant-garde, and forward everybody went, to the point where nobody quite knew just where he was going, and art had ceased to be something to look at and become something to think about instead. Then, in a burst of inspiration, Andy Warhol began producing Brillo Boxes. These were not figurative paintings, since they were indistinguishable from the originals. But nor were they ‘avant-garde’, since they were neither abstract squiggles, nor demolitions of reality. They were just there, with no explanation, because that was what the artist had done.

After a while, with the emergence of pop art and advert-art, and a few more attempts at conceptual art, the way was once again open for kitsch.

A fine line between art and kitsch (Forbes)

Jerry Saltz has some thoughts about the Selfie:

Selfies come from all of us; they are a folk art that is already expanding the language and lexicon of photography. Selfies are a photography of modern life—not that academics or curators are paying much attention to them. They will, though: In a hundred years, the mass of selfies will be an incredible record of the fine details of everyday life. Imagine what we could see if we had millions of these from the streets of imperial Rome. […]

Although theorists like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes saw melancholy and signs of death in every photograph, selfies aren’t for the ages. They’re like the cartoon dog who, when asked what time it is, always says, “Now! Now! Now!”

We might ask what art-historical and visual DNA form the selfie’s roots and structures. There are old photos of people holding cameras out to take their own pictures. (Often, people did this to knock off the last frame in a roll of film, so it could be rewound and sent to be processed.) Still, the genre remained unclear, nebulous, and uncodified. Looking back for trace elements, I discern strong selfie echoes in Van Gogh’s amazing self-portraits [4]—some of the same intensity, immediacy, and need to reveal something inner to the outside world in the most vivid way possible. Warhol, of course, comes to mind with his love of the present, performative persona and his wild Day-Glo color. But he took his own instant photos of other subjects, or had his subjects shoot themselves in a photo booth—both devices with far more objective lenses than a smartphone, as well as different formats and depths of field. Many will point to Cindy Sherman. But none of her pictures is taken in any selfie way. Moreover, her photographs show us the characters and selves that exist in her unbridled pictorial imagination. She’s not there.

Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie (Vulture/NYMag)