Autumn 2004- Donald Kuspit: the End of Art
Review C109 Emmanuel Asare, the humble cleaner who binned Damien Hirst's installation Home sweet home - it consisted of a clutter of fag ends, beer bottles, coke cans, coffee cups and sweet wrappings on a table, so credit where credit is due - explained to reporters that he did so because he "didn't think for a second that it was a work of art." Well, neither does Donald Kuspit. Nor, for what it's worth, do I. Kuspit, one of America's leading visual-arts critics and Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York, labels works like Home sweet home as -'postart' - a visual-arts category devised by Allan Kaprow, which Kuspit uses to pejoratively describe artworks (invariably postmodern) that express a rejection of the forms, methods, inspirations and aspirations of classical and modern art and therefore can no longer be called artworks in the true sense. Crucially, postart is art that blurs the distinction between everyday life and art. Kuspit traces the genealogy of the postart aesthetic from Marcel Duchamp's announcement of an ‘entropic split' between intellectual expression and animal expression (which led to the reification of concept over form, and from there to a nihilistic pessimism) through Warhol's commercialism (which blurred the line between art and business) to Hirst's installations (which reflect postmodernism's preoccupation with the banal objects and situations of our everyday lives). Along the way, Kuspit blends psychoanalytic criticism (fear and ignorance of the unconscious as a creative source in postart is a central theme, and a psychobiographical vignette featuring Duchamp is one of the book's many highlights), philosophy ( The End of Art can be read as a defence of elements of modernist and Freudian aesthetics), and art history to make a powerful and compelling case for dismissal of the postart aesthetics. If the visual arts are to be saved, then according to Kuspit the New Old Masters - a group that includes Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville - will be their saviours. The New Old Masters embody values that simultaneously evoke the spirituality and humanism of the Old Masters and the innovation and criticality of the New Masters, enabling them to transcend the suicidal intellectualism and socio-political fixations of postart. An absorbing, multi-faceted and contentious attack, less points the way for the future of the visual arts - Kuspit's description of the New Old Masters is largely confined to a postscript - than it, like Asare, clears away the conceptual and material debris with which our galleries have grown cluttered. Emmet Cole is a freelance journalist and writer based in Dublin; www.emmetcole.com Donald Kuspit: The End of Art , pp 224, £25.00, ISBN 0521832527, March 2004, Cambridge University Press.
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