How Capitalism Can Save Art

Wall Street Journal: How Capitalism Can Save Art – Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia on why a new generation has chosen iPhones and other glittering gadgets as its canvas.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music
and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been
in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound
influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop
Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. …

… But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to
say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists
have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an
airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers
from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism
far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am
speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.) …

… It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is
dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his
art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup
cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned. …

…  For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued
from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization
of the trades that would allow students to enter those fields without
social prejudice (which often emanates from parents eager for the false
cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the car). Among my students at art
schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already
earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see
themselves as entrepreneurs.

Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts,
above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that
the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have
been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free
of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a
clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is
modern reality.

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it
is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary
aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and
enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism
by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young
artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our
time.

Over the past century, industrial design has steadily gained on the
fine arts and has now surpassed them in cultural impact. In the age of
travel and speed that began just before World War I, machines became
smaller and sleeker. Streamlining, developed for race cars, trains,
airplanes and ocean liners, was extended in the 1920s to appliances like
vacuum cleaners and washing machines. The smooth white towers of
electric refrigerators (replacing clunky iceboxes) embodied the elegant
new minimalism. …

… Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological
environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from
beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices
are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their
round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no
spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most
talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt
for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges
possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as
reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract
artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored
or suppressed.

Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders
before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine
arts have become a wasteland?