Los Angels Times

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Forget 'isms' — except eclecticism

Those discrete movements you studied in art history? They're long gone. Today, it's all about diversity — and quality, of course.

By Christopher Knight
Times Staff Writer

October 1, 2006

The question was innocent enough. "What's going on with contemporary art these days?"

My answer was equally candid. "Beats me."

I do spend a sizable chunk of my time looking at, reading about and thinking over new art in Los Angeles and elsewhere, but the days when a succinct response might quickly sum up the art scene are long gone. Partly that's because contemporary art has gone global. The decade of the 1980s was a pivot, when New York's postwar role as serious art's only serious city came to an end.

Mostly, though, it's because art, wherever it is made, no longer subscribes to a single dominant trend with a few rambunctious alternatives jostling for supremacy. Art is eclectic — and today we take that eclecticism for granted. Look around. The extreme breadth of artistic diversity is so familiar and so routine as to border on invisibility.
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'Pluralism' doesn't do it justice

I use the word "eclectic" rather than "pluralist" for a reason. Eclecticism is a virtue because not only does it draw from a variety of sources and promote divergent positions, it also makes an argument about what is best among the various doctrines, methods or styles it employs. Eclecticism is elitist in the finest sense of that widely misused word, which has nothing to do with old-fashioned notions of exclusive aristocratic taste and everything to do with embracing diversity while also demanding quality.

In the 1980s some critics advanced pluralism as art's natural condition. They were partly right. The idea that two or more kinds of ultimate artistic reality could comfortably coexist hasn't always been in vogue.

Twentieth century art was long charted as an almost linear succession of "isms" — from Fauvism in 1905 to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s — discrete movements that each expressed its own unitary view of things. The monolithic view that had congealed by the 1960s was a belief that the eye held dominion over art. That limited judgment was toppled by Conceptualism, which devalued everything visual in art and instead polished up the stature of ideas.

"The idea becomes the machine that makes the art," Sol LeWitt famously wrote in 1967 to explain Conceptual art. And the idea could range far and wide, encompassing virtually any subject, attitude or experience one might imagine.

Looking back from today's art world, though, a slightly different history of eclectic art suggests itself. Conceptual art doesn't mark the decisive break, just the elaboration and consolidation of an idea already in play. Pop art marks the most profound rupture. The landmark exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's 1950s hybrids of painting and sculpture that closed recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art convinced me of that. Rauschenberg, together with Jasper Johns, set the stage for Pop. Their work undermined art's established structure. Pop art tipped it over.

With its commercial subject matter, pitch-perfect sense of style, wicked humor, easy sociability and serious refusal to take art too seriously, Pop made hash of the rigid hierarchy of high art (painting, sculpture, drawing) and low art (TV, tabloids, photographs). An entrenched legacy of an aristocratic worldview, this hierarchy of high and low was traded in for a more fluid, porous pecking order. The early-'60s work of Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha and Roy Lichtenstein is as brainy as the existential subjects of the Abstract Expressionist artists that preceded them, and it is also as dumb as the Sunday funnies are. That's about as eclectic as a work of art can be.

One place the breadth and scope of the contemporary art scene is creating increasing pressures is in museums. Few were engaged with contemporary art 30 years ago, but many have waded in, desirous of the energy and public interest that come with the territory. Few, however, are equipped to handle the lively situation since it contradicts the orderly traditions of institutional structure. Nowhere has the problem been more keenly felt than in New York, center of not just the art market and art media but traditional museum culture. Contemporary programming at the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, the Modern and Whitney can most charitably be described as a train wreck.

So, what's going on with contemporary art these days? It's a post-Pop world, "ism"-free and with no end in sight. Pop culture used to be synonymous with mass culture, but in the era of 500 cable channels, iPods and the Internet, broadcasting has faltered and been joined by vibrant narrowcasting. Contemporary art's avid audience now approaches in size the ratings for HBO's latest hit. America's political battles of the past 20 years may center on attempts to repeal or defend the dramatic changes wrought during the 1960s, but our robust artistic bounty today is its resplendent legacy.