Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [63]
Pollock, along with many other of the new abstract artists adopted by the elite, sought to turn the process of producing art into spectacle. These so-called action painters, as Neal Gabler writes, “used their canvases as a kind of movie screen for the creation of art and made themselves into romantic action heroes, bounding, thrashing, and raging their way across that canvas/screen and leaving art in their wake.” Pollock spoke of literally being “in the painting as if,” Gabler writes, “he were an actor in a film.”7 It would be left to Andy Warhol to point out that the most important art movement of the twentieth century wasn’t cubism or surrealism or fauvism or minimalism or op or pop, to which [Warhol] himself nominally belonged. No, the most important art movement was celebrity. Eventually, no matter who the artist was and no matter what school he belonged to, the entertainment society made his fame his achievement and not his achievement his fame. The visual art, like so much else in American life, was a macguffin for the artist. It was just a means to celebrity, which was the real artwork.8
Wealthy art patrons backed organizations such as the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, set up to counter the politically active Artists Congress. The Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors was, as Max Kozloff wrote, “interested more in aesthetic values than in political action.” Kozloff also pointed out the similarity between “American Cold War rhetoric” and the existentialist-individualist credos of Abstract Expressionist artists. Artistic expression became as domesticated and depoliticized as union activity, journalism, scholarship, and political discourse.
“The alleged separation of art from politics proclaimed throughout the ‘free world’ with the resurgence of abstraction after World War II was part of a general tendency in intellectual circles towards ‘objectivity, ’ ” wrote the art historian Eva Cockroft:So foreign to the newly developing apolitical milieu of the 1950s was the idea of political commitment—not only to artists but also to many other intellectuals—that one social historian, Daniel Bell, eventually was to proclaim the postwar period as “the end of ideology.” Abstract Expressionism neatly fits the needs of this supposedly new historical epoch. By giving their painting an individualist emphasis and eliminating recognizable subject matter, the Abstract Expressionists succeeded in creating an important new art movement. They also contributed, whether they knew it or not, to a purely political phenomenon - the supposed divorce between art and politics which so perfectly served America’s needs in the Cold War.9
Art schools have become as utilitarian as journalism schools. As the art historian Carol Becker notes, art schools train students not to be powerful in society but “to fit into the art world, but not into the world as it exists. You can see it in our public school system, where art is marginalized almost as some sort of leisure activity.” Art, as Becker points out, “is relegated to a place of nostalgic longing, high culture, or entertainment. Most people if asked would say that art exists to infuse the world with beauty and vitality. It is not understood, except by the art world itself, as a legitimate arena for controversy and debate. In this society, art is not defined within the arena of real power—namely, politics.”10
Art schools produce, along with departments devoted to the sciences and technologies, the specialist,