No More Learning

The Rise and Fall of English12 ? What's Happened to the Humanities? 13 ? Who Killed Culture? 14
If we are to believe the pessimists, the decline has been going on for some time. In 1948 T. S. Eliot wrote, "We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. "15
{401}
Some of the vital signs of the arts and humanities are indeed poor. In 1997 the U. S. House of Representatives voted to kill the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Senate was able to save it only by cutting its budget nearly in half. Universities have disinvested in the humanities: since 1960, the proportion of faculty in liberal arts has fallen by half, salaries and working conditions have stagnated, and more and more teaching is done by graduate students and part-time faculty. 16 New Ph. D. s are often unemployed or resigned to a life of one-year appointments. In many liberal arts colleges, humanities departments have been downsized, merged, or eliminated altogether.
One cause of the decline in academia is competition from the efflorescence of science and engineering. Another may be a surfeit of Ph. D. s pumped out by graduate programs that failed to practice academic birth control. But the problem is as much a reduction in the demand by students as an increase in the supply of professors. While the total number of bachelor's degrees rose by almost 40 percent between 1970 and 1994, the number of degrees in English declined by 40 percent. It may get worse: only 9 percent of high school students today indicate an interest in majoring in the humanities. 17 One university was so desperate to restore enrollment in its College of Arts and Sciences that it hired an advertising firm to come up with a "Think for a Living" campaign. Here are some of the slogans they came up with:
Do what you want when you graduate or wait 20 years for your mid-life crisis. Insurance for when the robots take over all the boring jobs.
Okay then. Follow your dreams in your next life.
Yeah, like your parents are so happy.
Careerism may explain the disenchantment some students feel with liberal arts, but not all of it. The economy is in better shape today than it was in periods in which the humanities were more popular, and many young people still do not shoot themselves from cannons into their careers but use their college years to enrich themselves in various ways. There is no good reason that the arts and humanities should not be able to compete for students' attention during this interlude. A knowledge of culture, history, and ideas is still an asset in most professions, as it is in everyday life. But students stay away from the humanities anyway.
In this chapter I will diagnose the malaise of the arts and humanities and offer some suggestions for revitalizing them. They didn't ask me, but by their own accounts they need all the help they can get, and I believe that part of the answer lies within the theme of this book. I will begin by circumscribing the problem. {402}
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As a matter of fact, the arts and humanities are not in trouble. According to recent assessments based on data from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Statistical Abstract of the United States, they have never been in better shape. 18 In the past two decades, symphony orchestras, booksellers, libraries, and new independent films have all increased in number. Attendance is up, in some cases at record levels, at classical music concerts, live theater, opera performances, and art museums, as we see in blockbuster shows with long lines and scarce tickets. The number of books in print (including books of art, poetry, and drama) has exploded, as have book sales. Nor have people become passive consumers of art. The year 1997 broke records for the proportion of adults drawing, taking art photographs, buying art, and doing creative writing.
Advances in technology have made art more accessible than ever before. A couple of hours of minimum-wage income can buy any of tens of thousands of audiophile-quality musical recordings, including many versions of any classical work performed by the world's great orchestras. Video stores allow people in the boondocks to arrange cheap private screenings of the great classics of cinema. Instead of the three television networks with their sitcoms, variety shows, and soaps, most Americans can now choose from a menu of fifty to a hundred stations, including ones
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? that specialize in history, science, politics, and the arts. Inexpensive video equipment and streaming video on the World Wide Web are allowing independent filmmaking to flourish. Virtually any book in print is available within days to anyone with a credit card and a modem. On the Web one can find the text of all the major novels, poems, plays, and works of philosophy and scholarship that have fallen out of copyright, as well as virtual tours of the world's great art museums. New intellectual e-zines and web sites have proliferated, and back issues are instantly available.
We are swimming in culture, drowning in it. So why all the lamentations about its plight, decline, fall, collapse, twilight, and death?
One response from the doomsayers is that the current frenzy of consumption involves past classics and current mediocrities but that few new works of quality are coming into the world. That is doubtful. 19 As historians of the arts repeatedly tell us, all the supposed sins of contemporary culture -- mass appeal, the profit motive, themes of sex and violence, and adaptations to popular formats (such as serialization in newspapers) -- may be found in the great artists of past centuries. Even in recent decades, many artists were seen in their time as commercial hacks and only later attained artistic respectability. Examples include the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and, if we are to judge by recent museum shows and critical appreciations, even Norman Rockwell. There are dozens of excellent novelists from countries all over the world, and though most television and cinema is dreadful, the best can be very good {403} indeed: Carla on Cheers was wittier than Dorothy Parker, and the plot of Tootsie is cleverer than the plots of any of Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies.
As for music, though it may be hard for anyone to compete against the best composers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the past century has been anything but barren. Jazz, Broadway, country, blues, folk, rock, soul, samba, reggae, world music, and contemporary composition have blossomed. Each has produced gifted artists and has introduced new complexities of rhythm, instrumentation, vocal style, and studio production into our total musical experience. Then there are genres that are flourishing as never before, such as animation and industrial design, and still others that have only recently come into existence but have already achieved moments of high accomplishment, such as computer graphics and rock videos (for instance, Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer).
In every era for thousands of years critics have bemoaned the decline of culture, and the economist Tyler Cowen suggests they are the victims of a cognitive illusion. The best works of art are more likely to appear in a past decade than in the present decade for the same reason that another line in the supermarket always moves faster than the one you are in: there are more of them. We get to enjoy the greatest hits winnowed from all those decades, listening to the Mozarts and forgetting the Salieris. Also, genres of art (opera, Impressionist painting, Broadway musicals, film noir) usually blossom and fade in a finite span of time. It's hard to recognize nascent art forms when they are on the rise, and by the time they are widely appreciated their best days are behind them. Cowen also notes, citing Hobbes, that putting down the present is a backhanded way of putting down one's rivals: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead. "20
But in three circumscribed areas the arts really do have something to be depressed about. One is the traditions of elite art that descended from prestigious European genres, such as the music performed by symphony orchestras, the art shown in major galleries and museums, and the ballet performed by major companies. Here there really may be a drought of compelling new material. For example, 90 percent of "classical music" was composed before 1900, and the most influential composers in the twentieth century were active before 1940. 21
The second is the guild of critics and cultural gatekeepers, who have seen their influence dwindle. The 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner is about a literary critic who achieved such celebrity that we can believe that the burghers of a small Ohio town would coo and fawn over him. It is hard to think of a contemporary critic who could plausibly inspire such a character.
And the third, of course, is the groves of academe, where the foibles of the humanities departments have been fodder for satirical novels and the subject of endless fretting and analyzing.
After nineteen chapters, you can probably guess where I will seek a {404} diagnosis for these three ailing endeavors. The giveaway lies in a statement (attributed to Virginia Woolf) that can be found in countless English course outlines: "On or about December, 1910, human nature changed. " She was referring to the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. The point of this chapter is that the elite arts, criticism, and scholarship are in trouble because the statement is wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter. 22
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Art is in our nature -- in the blood and in the bone, as people used to say; in the brain and in the genes, as we might say today. In all societies people dance, sing, decorate surfaces, and tell and act out stories. Children begin to take
? ? ? ? ? ? part in these activities in their twos and threes, and the arts may even be reflected in the organization of the adult brain: neurological damage may leave a person able to hear and see but unable to appreciate music or visual beauty. 23
Paintings, jewelry, sculpture, and musical instruments go back at least 35,000 years in Europe, and probably far longer in other parts of the world where the archaeological record is scanty. The Australian aborigines have been painting on rocks for 50,000 years, and red ochre has been used as body makeup for at least twice that long. 24 Though the exact forms of art vary widely across cultures, the activities of making and appreciating art are recognizable everywhere. The philosopher Denis Dutton has identified seven universal signatures:25
1. Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2. Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
3. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
4. Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
5. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
6. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
7. Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theater of the imagination.
The psychological roots of these activities have become a topic of recent research and debate. Some researchers, such as the scholar Ellen Dissanayake, {405} believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the ability to see in depth. 26 Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends. 27 On this view art is a pleasure technology, like drugs, erotica, or fine cuisine -- a way to purify and concentrate pleasurable stimuli and deliver them to our senses. For the discussion in this chapter it does not matter which view is correct. Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties. Here are some of those roots.
Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors, such as the taste of food, the experience of sex, the presence of children, and the attainment of know-how. Some forms of visual pleasure in natural environments may promote fitness, too. As people explore an environment, they seek patterns that help them negotiate it and take advantage of its contents. The patterns include well-delineated regions, improbable but informative features like parallel and perpendicular lines, and axes of symmetry and elongation. All are used by the brain to carve the visual field into surfaces, group the surfaces into objects, and organize the objects so people can recognize them the next time they see them. Vision researchers such as David Marr, Roger Shepard, and V. S. Ramachandran have suggested that the pleasing visual motifs used in art and decoration exaggerate these patterns, which tell the brain that the visual system is functioning properly and analyzing the world accurately. 28 By the same logic, tonal and rhythmic patterns in music may tap into mechanisms used by the auditory system to organize the world of sound. 29
As the visual system converts raw colors and forms to interpretable objects and scenes, the aesthetic coloring of its products gets even richer. Surveys of art, photography, and landscape design, together with experiments on people's visual tastes, have found recurring motifs in the sights that give people pleasure. 30 Some of the motifs may belong to a search image for the optimal human habitat, a savanna: open grassland dotted with trees and bodies of water and inhabited by animals and flowering and fruiting plants. The enjoyment of the forms of living things has been dubbed biophilia by E. O. Wilson, and it appears to be a human universal. 31 Other patterns in a landscape may be pleasing because they are signals of safety, such as protected but panoramic views. Still others may be compelling because they are geographic features that make a terrain easy to explore and remember, such as landmarks, boundaries, and paths. The study of evolutionary aesthetics is also documenting the features that make a face or body beautiful. 32 The prized lineaments are those that signal health, vigor, and fertility.
People are imaginative animals who constantly recombine events in their mind's eye. That ability is one of the engines of human intelligence, allowing {406} us to envision new technologies (such as snaring an animal or purifying a plant extract) and new social skills (such as exchanging promises or finding common enemies). 33 Narrative fiction engages this ability to explore hypothetical worlds, whether for edification -- expanding the number of scenarios whose outcomes can be predicted -- or for pleasure -- vicariously experiencing love, adulation, exploration, or victory. 34 Hence Horace's definition of the purpose of literature: to instruct and to delight.
In good works of art, these aesthetic elements are layered so that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 35 A good
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? landscape painting or photograph will simultaneously evoke an inviting environment and be composed of geometric shapes with pleasing balance and contrast. A compelling story may simulate juicy gossip about desirable or powerful people, put us in an exciting time or place, tickle our language instincts with well-chosen words, and teach us something new about the entanglements of families, politics, or love. Many kinds of art are contrived to induce a buildup and release of psychological tension, mimicking other forms of pleasure. And a work of art is often embedded in a social happening in which the emotions are evoked in many members of a community at the same time, which can multiply the pleasure and grant a sense of solidarity. Dissanayake emphasizes this spiritual part of the art experience, which she calls "making special. "36
A final bit of psychology engaged by the arts is the drive for status. One of the items on Dutton's list of the universal signatures of art is impracticality. But useless things, paradoxically, can be highly useful for a certain purpose: appraising the assets of the bearer. Thorstein Veblen first made the point in his theory of social status. 37 Since we cannot easily peer into the bank books or Palm Pilots of our neighbors, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste them on luxuries and leisure. Veblen wrote that the psychology of taste is driven by three "pecuniary canons": conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste. They explain why status symbols are typically objects made by arduous and specialized labor out of rare materials, or else signs that the person is not bound to a life of manual toil, such as delicate and restrictive clothing or expensive and time-consuming hobbies. In a beautiful convergence, the biologist Amotz Zahavi used the same principle to explain the evolution of outlandish ornamentation in animals, such as the tail of the peacock. 38 Only the healthiest peacocks can afford to divert nutrients to expensive and cumbersome plumage. The peahen sizes up mates by the splendor of their tails, and evolution selects for males who muster the best ones.
Though most aficionados are aghast at the suggestion, art -- especially elite art -- is a textbook example of conspicuous consumption. Almost by definition, art has no practical function, and as Dutton points out in his list, it universally entails virtuosity (a sign of genetic quality, the free time to hone skills, or both) and criticism (which sizes up the worth of the art and the {407} artist).
Through most of European history, fine art and sumptuosity went hand in hand, as in the ostentatious decorations of opera and theater halls, the ornate frames around paintings, the formal dress of musicians, and the covers and bindings of old books. Art and artists were under the patronage of aristocrats or of the nouveau riche seeking instant respectability. Today, paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts continue to be sold at exorbitant and much-discussed prices (such as the $82. 5 million paid for van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet in 1990).
In The Mating Mind, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic: a way to impress prospective sexual and marriage partners with the quality of one's brain and thus, indirectly, one's genes. Artistic virtuosity, he notes, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake, and widely prized. Artists, in other words, are sexy. Nature even gives us a precedent, the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. The males construct elaborate nests and fastidiously decorate them with colorful objects such as orchids, snail shells, berries, and bark. Some of them literally paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit residue using leaves or bark as a brush. The females appraise the bowers and mate with the creators of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented ones. Miller argues that the analogy is exact:
If you could interview a male Satin Bowerbird for Artforum magazine, he might say something like "I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable. I cannot remember when I first developed this raging thirst to present richly saturated color-fields within a monumental yet minimalist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when I indulge these passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I simply must have it for my own. When I see a single shell out of place in my creation, I must put it right. . . . It is a happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to suggest that I create in order to procreate. " Fortunately, bowerbirds cannot talk, so we are free to use sexual selection to explain their work, without them begging to differ. 39
I am partial to a weaker version of the theory, in which one of the functions (not the only function) of creating and owning art is to impress other people (not just prospective mates) with one's social status (not just one's genetic quality). The idea goes back to Veblen and has been amplified by the art historian Quentin Bell and by Tom Wolfe in his fiction and nonfiction. 40 Perhaps its greatest champion today is the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that connoisseurship of difficult and inaccessible works of culture serves as a membership badge in society's upper strata. 41 Remember that in all {408} these theories, proximate and ultimate causes may be different. As with Miller's bowerbird, status and fitness need not enter the minds of people who create or appreciate art; they may simply explain how an urge for self-expression and an eye for beauty and skill evolved.
Regardless of what lies behind our instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time, place, and
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? culture. Hume noted that "the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature. . . . the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London. "42 Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic really can be discerned beneath the variation across cultures. Dutton comments:
It is important to note how remarkably well the arts travel outside their home cultures: Beethoven and Shakespeare are beloved in Japan, Japanese prints are adored by Brazilians, Greek tragedy is performed worldwide, while, much to the regret of many local movie industries, Hollywood films have wide cross-cultural appeal. . . . Even Indian music . . . , while it sounds initially strange to the Western ear, can be shown to rely on rhythmic pulse and acceleration, repetition, variation and surprise, as well as modulation and divinely sweet melody: in fact, all the same devices found in Western music. 43
One can extend the range of the human aesthetic even further. The Lascaux cave paintings, crafted in the late old Stone Age, continue to dazzle viewers in the age of the Internet. The faces of Nefertiti and Botticelli's Venus could appear on the cover of a twenty-first-century fashion magazine. The plot of the hero myth found in countless traditional cultures was transplanted effectively into the Star Wars saga. Western museum collectors plundered the prehistoric treasures of Africa, Asia, and the Americas not to add to the ethnographic record but because their patrons found the works beautiful to gaze at.
A wry demonstration of the universality of basic visual tastes came from a 1993 stunt by two artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who used marketing research polls to assess Americans' taste in art. 44 They asked respondents about their preferences in color, subject matter, composition, and style, and found considerable uniformity. People said they liked realistic, smoothly painted landscapes in green and blue containing animals, women, children, and heroic figures. To satisfy this consumer demand, Komar and Melamid painted a composite of the responses: a lakeside landscape in a nineteenth-century realist style featuring children, deer, and George Washington. That's mildly amusing, but no one was prepared for what came next. When the painters replicated the polling in nine other countries, including Ukraine, Turkey, China, and Kenya, they found pretty much the same
{409} preferences: an idealized landscape, like the ones on calendars, and only minor substitutions from the American standard (hippos instead of deer, for example). What is even more interesting is that these McPaintings exemplify the kind of landscape that had been characterized as optimal for our species by researchers in evolutionary aesthetics. 45
The art critic Arthur Danto had a different explanation: Western calendars are marketed all over the world, just like the rest of Western culture and art. 46 To many intellectuals, the globalization of Western styles is proof that tastes in art are arbitrary. People show similar aesthetic preferences, they claim, only because Western ideals have been exported to the world by imperialism, global business, and electronic media. There may be some truth to this, and for many people it is the morally correct position because it implies that there is nothing superior about Western culture or inferior about the indigenous ones it is replacing.
But there is another side to the story. Western societies are good at providing things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and abundant food, rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these goods and services not from benevolence but from self-interest, namely the profits to be made in selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also perfected ways of giving people what they like -- in this case, art forms that appeal to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Hollywood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the West, it may be not an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic. This all sounds very parochial and Eurocentric, and I wouldn't push it too far, but it must have an element of truth: if there is a profit to be made in appealing to global human tastes, it would be surprising if entrepreneurs hadn't taken advantage of it. And it isn't as Eurocentric as one might think. Western culture, like Western technology and Western cuisine, is voraciously eclectic, appropriating any trick that pleases people from any culture it encounters. An example is one of America's most important culture exports, popular music. Ragtime, jazz, rock, blues, soul, and rap grew out of African American musical forms, which originally incorporated African rhythms and vocal styles.
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So what happened in 1910 that supposedly changed human nature? The event that stood out in Virginia Woolf's recollection was a London exhibition of the paintings of the post-Impressionists, including Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and van Gogh. It was an unveiling of the movement called modernism, and when Woolf wrote her declaration in the 1920s, the movement was taking over the arts.
Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast {410} aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes. Modernist architecture culminated both in the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations and in the dreary high-rises of American housing projects, postwar British council flats, and Soviet apartment blocks.
Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the nai? ve bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place. And science, supposedly, was offering the same message. According to the version that trickled into the humanities, Freud showed that behavior springs from unconscious and irrational impulses, Einstein showed that time and space can be defined only relative to an observer, and Heisenberg showed that the position and momentum of an object were inherently uncertain because they were affected by the act of observation. Much later, this embroidery of physics inspired the famous hoax in which the physicist Alan Sokal successfully published a paper filled with gibberish in the journal Social Text. 47
But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda. In a review of a book defending the mission of modernism, the critic Frederick Turner explains them:
The great project of modern art was to diagnose, and cure, the sickness unto death of modern humankind. . . . [Its artistic mission] is to identify and strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive framing provided by conformist mass commercial society, and to make us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our peeled and rejuvenated senses. This therapeutic work is also a spiritual {411} mission, in that a community of such transformed human beings would, in theory, be able to construct a better kind of society. The enemies of the process are cooptation, commercial exploitation and reproduction, and kitsch. . . . Fresh, raw experience -- to which artists have an unmediated and childlike access -- is routinized, compartmentalized, and dulled into insensibility by society. 48
Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic, insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meaning, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass-produced commodities and media-disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible.
The goal of postmodernist art is to help us break out of this prison. The artists try to preempt cultural motifs and representational techniques by taking capitalist icons (such as ads, package designs, and pinup photos) and defacing them, exaggerating them, or presenting them in odd contexts. The earliest examples were Andy Warhol's paintings of soup can labels and his repetitive false-color images of Marilyn Monroe. More recent ones include the Whitney Museum's "Black Male" exhibit described in Chapter 12 and Cindy Sherman's photographs of grotesquely assembled bi-gendered mannequins. (I saw them as part of an MIT exhibit that explored "the female body as a site of conflicting desires, and femininity as a taut web of social expectations, historical assumptions, and ideological constructions. ") In postmodernist literature, authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it. In postmodernist architecture, materials and details from different kinds of buildings and historical periods are thrown together in incongruous ways, such as an awning made of chain-link fencing in a fancy shopping mall or Corinthian columns holding up nothing on the top of a sleek skyscraper. Postmodernist films contain sly references to the filmmaking process or to earlier films. In all these forms, irony, self-referential allusions, and the pretense of not taking the work seriously are meant to draw attention to the representations themselves, which (according to the doctrine) we are ordinarily in danger of mistaking for reality.
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? ? ? ? Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for
? their decline and fall become all {412} too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability -- stripping away pretense -- to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters, the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, animals, and other people and their intentions.
Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one. 49 Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play. 50
When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with them and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are not trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue by postmodernist artists.
Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited. 51 Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists. {413}
In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and lightweight. 52 In his 1913 book Art, the critic Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf's brother-in-law and Quentin's father) argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences. 53 People use beautiful in phrases like "beautiful huntin' and shootin'," he wrote, or worse, to refer to beautiful women. Bell assimilated the behaviorist psychology of his day and argued that ordinary people come to enjoy art by a process of Pavlovian conditioning. They appreciate a painting only if it depicts a beautiful woman, music only if it evokes "emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces," and poetry only if it arouses feelings like the ones once felt for the vicar's daughter. Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty. "54 Postmodernists were even more dismissive. Beauty, they said, consists of arbitrary standards dictated by an elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to conform to unrealistic ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collectors. 55
To be fair, modernism comprises many styles and artists, and not all of them rejected beauty and other human sensibilities. At its best, modernist design perfected a visual elegance and an aesthetic of form-following-function that were welcome alternatives to Victorian bric-a-brac and ostentatious displays of wealth. The art movements opened up new stylistic possibilities, including motifs from Africa and Oceania. The fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual workouts, and countered a sentimental romanticism that saw art as a spontaneous overflow of the artist's personality and emotion. The problem with modernism was that its philosophy did not acknowledge the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure. As its denial of beauty became an orthodoxy, and as its aesthetic successes were appropriated into {414} commercial culture (such as minimalism in graphic design), modernism left nowhere for artists to go.
Quentin Bell suggested that when the variations within a genre are exhausted, people avail themselves of a different canon of status, which he added to Veblen's list. In "conspicuous outrage," bad boys (and girls) flaunt their ability to get away with shocking the bourgeoisie. 56 The never-ending campaign by postmodernist artists to attract the attention of a jaded public progressed from puzzling audiences to doing everything they could to offend them. Everyone has heard of the notorious cases: Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of sadomasochistic acts, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a photo of a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung, and the nine-hour performance piece "Flag Fuck (w/Beef) #17B," in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an American flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat. Actually, this last one never happened; it was invented by writers for the satirical newspaper The Onion in an article entitled "Performance Artist Shocks U. S. Out of Apathetic Slumber. "57 But I bet I had you fooled.
Another result is that elite art could no longer be appreciated without a support team of critics and theoreticians. They did not simply evaluate and interpret art, like movie critics or book reviewers, but supplied the art with its rationale. Tom Wolfe wrote The Painted Word after reading an art review in the New York Times that criticized realist painting because it lacked "something crucial," namely, "a persuasive theory. " Wolfe explains:
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha!