[-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 42, Issue 9

[John Haber]

For who is art made is not always a pressing question.  In some page
ages, where notions of patronage were clear, it might seem irreverent to
ask; and yet one would also acknowledge that the artist made some
decisions for personal reasons, out of dedication to certain models and
traditions, and so on.  That's why Poussin is at once the very model of
French academic art and someone so uncomfortable with his career in
France that he executed that model mostly in Rome.  In portions of the
20th century, it would seem obvious that artists make art out of deep
personal conviction, with insistence that if a public gets it, that's
the only public that matters; but the demands of that public could be
pretty contentious anyhow.  There were still fights, as around
Greenberg's opinion, and still exclusions, as of "minor" artists and
women. 

By the 1960s the question got pressing again because it wasn't clear who
got to answer "is that art?"  It's pressing again in this decade because
audiences have broadened, with the new money from abroad cruising the
Armory Show, Jeff Koons in Rockefeller Center or the roof of the Met,
and new publics for Cai or Barney at the Guggenheim.  Still, as in those
past ages, even a simple answer can overlook that answer shouldn't
presume a single, indivisible, uncontested "who."  Meanwhile artists are
doing a lot of really personal strange things, but it's funny how often
they still care what friends, including other artists they trust, think. 

There's the theory that art is whatever artists do, but then who's an
artist, other than someone who makes art.  There's the theory that
defines art institutionally, through the art world, but it's not clear
who gets to vote and how the votes are counted.  There are probably lots
of art worlds, and any of them is divided.  You could say something
similar that about any single person's mind since Freud, too.  So maybe
it's more productive to ask different questions. 

You could ask who is this (Norman Rockwell knockoffs, X-Men comics) made
for, and do I really have to take them seriously.  (Someone does, but
not necessarily if the "I" is me.)  You could ask is artists still can
take chances because they believe in something.  (I hope so.)  You can
ask what's changed in patronage now and how that's affecting art.  Only
a little tongue in cheek, one could say that the Renaissance was old
money chasing new ideas, Mannerism was new money chasing old ideas, the
late Baroque was old money chasing old ideas, and Modernism was new
money chasing new ideas.  Which is it now?  Maybe a little like
Mannerism, which would explain why it's obsession with reflecting on the
Renaissance has a parallel in current art's self-aware reflections on
Modernism. 

John