The Legends of the Modern: A Reappraisal of Modernity from Shakespeare to the Age of Duchamp 9781501353840, 9781501353871, 9781501353864

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The Legends of the Modern

The Legends of the Modern A Reappraisal of Modernity from Shakespeare to the Age of Duchamp

Didier Maleuvre

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 This paperback edition published in 2021 Copyright © Didier Maleuvre, 2020 Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover photograph: David, 1501-1504, by Michelangelo (1475-1564), white marble statue, height 410 cm, Detail, Italy, 16th century © De Agostini Picture Library / G. Nimatallah / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Maleuvre, Didier, author. Title: The legends of the modern: a reappraisal of modernity from Shakespeare to the age of Duchamp / Didier Maleuvre. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019008326 (print) | LCCN 2019009230 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501353857 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501353864 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501353840 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Arts, Modern. | Modernism (Aesthetics) Classification: LCC NX449.5 (ebook) | LCC NX449.5 .M345 2019 (print) | DDC 700.9/04–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008326 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5384-0 PB: 978-1-5013-7197-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5386-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-5385-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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To the memory of Marie-Claire and Luri

“A picture lives by its legend, not by anything else.” PABLO PICASSO

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

PART ONE What Made Art Modern 1 Hamlet, or Art against Itself

15

2 Michelangelo, or the Labors of Freedom

39

3 Don Quixote, or the Weakness of Fiction PART TWO What Makes Modern Art 4 The Inward Turn

107

5 The Legend of Freedom

116

6 The Legend of the Artist 7 The Legend of the New

128 143

8 The Legend of Creativity

157

9 The Legend of Artistic Block

164

10 The Legend of Transcendence 11 The Legend of Subversion

186

12 The Legend of the End of Art Coda 215 Notes 216 Bibliography 235 Index 246

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INTRODUCTION

The reader who chanced on this book is presumably interested in at least two questions: One is “What makes modern art modern?” The other, “What does this book have to say about it?” The raison d’être of this book lies in the assumption that the second question is yet to receive a complete answer. On balance, it is sensible to suppose that this answer will always be incomplete and that future generations will understand modernity in a light which, should we see today, would probably blind us. We cannot expect our descendants to look into cultural modernity with our eyes, for the same reason that we now dissect hunter-gathering, medieval chivalry, the Spanish Inquisition, or court masques with eyes that have never seen mammoths, knightly quests, the tongue tearer, or life at court. This distance, on which anthropologists and scientists and historians calibrate their lens, has obviously been lacking in the study of modernity—the critic of modernity having been, so far, an inmate of modernity. Thus, our idea of “modernity” tends to follow a cognitive groove traced by modernity. Otherwise put, we have been looking at modernity with modern eyes. This, one could say, has given modernity too strong a hand in its interpretation. In fact, if the names “modern” (which in everyday speech can designate the latest design), “Postmodern,” or “post-Postmodern” suggest anything, it is that we struggle to disentangle ourselves from modern and Modernist habits of mind when thinking about the past, present, and future of art. Naturally we cannot lift ourselves out of our own cultural horizon and behold things such as they would look to an eternal judge. This doesn’t mean it isn’t worth our while trying to look at ourselves as the visitor from faraway saw the streets of London or Paris in the writings of eighteenthcentury Enlightenment philosophes: surprised and puzzled by everything and taking nothing for granted. A medieval observer would be bewildered by our tacit acceptance of such cornerstones of modern culture as creativity, expressive freedom, originality, or personal authenticity. It is likely these ideas will also look strange to future observers. Why should they not already look strange to the skeptical (this qualifier should go without saying) historian of the present? This skepticism, after all, was a hallmark of the modern revolution (dubbed “the age of doubt,” “l’ère du soupçon,” “the questioning era”). To demystify has been one of the driving aims of modernity. It follows that modernity should want us to question it and hence that it contains the

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seed of its own demystification. A book such as this one, which parses the fundamentals of modern cultural taste, simply harkens to the spirit of its subject. “Man’s emergence from self-induced immaturity” is how Immanuel Kant described the process of modernization he knew by the name of Aufklärung— the becoming “enlightened” of people and polities.1 The assumption then was that the premodern age had been mired in unexamined beliefs, assumptions, legends, myths, and pious superstitions that the enlightened, the mature, and the reasonable were tasked to dispel. To disturb the sacred dust of unexamined truths, to snap the fetters of falsehood, to clear the road to reason, decency, and truth—this was the moral mission of modernity, and scarcely any area of existence, institution, or rule of conduct was left untouched by this program of demystification. The arts were especially receptive to this attitude of spring cleaning. There, modernity’s program “to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance,” “to dare to know,” to throw away “the shackles” of “dogmas and formulas,” and to flaunt “the freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters” (to continue with Kant) found eager reception. Modern art—meaning the arts of the post-aristocratic age—was the hammer that smashes all idols, the debunker who takes nothing for granted, the questioner of everything that has ever been done and represented on the page, on the stage, or in the museum. But as it questioned and challenged and reconsidered, artistic modernity rolled into a cultural movement that set up its own cherished verities and narratives which, to be fair, also call for examination. The job of modernity, in sum, isn’t done until modernity puts into its own received truths under the magnifying glass. This, in a nutshell, is what this book proposes to do: it probes the philosophic foundations of the stories which cultural and artistic modernity has been telling about itself—its legends. *

*

*

In the arts, the term “modernity” conventionally designates a new disposition which sometime in the late Renaissance, and then more militantly in the wake of the revolutionary Romantic period, started staking artistic worth on the values of novelty, experimentation, expressive freedom, self-reflectivity, and the well-nigh transcendental power of art.2 The gist of my argument, however, is that these qualities alone—my so-called legends—did not make art modern. What made art modern is disenchantment with the promises held out by novelty, freedom, reflectivity, and transcendence. As I explain in Part One of this book, this disenchantment spurs the making of a recognizably modern form of art in the great precursors Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes. As for modern forms proper, that is, the art that arises postRomanticism, I explain that they are not really the triumph of the qualities commonly thought to typify modernity; rather, they are a long, convulsive,

INTRODUCTION

3

and marvelously rich labor of confronting the contradictions inherent in the legendry of the modern. If my direction is original, my aim, as the reader will find, isn’t iconoclastic. It is not to cast doubt on the achievements of modern works of art; rather, it is to exhibit the doubt of which they are made. In fact, my attention in this book is less with works of art proper, especially in Part Two, than with the ideas or aesthetic system that underpin them. It is a system which by and large presented itself as improvement on the classical, time-worn ways. In the battle between classic and modern which rolls on from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, modernity rode on great expectations, and great expectations have in them the seed of great disappointments or, barring that, of great reassessments. As it happens, I found such critical examinations of the modern sensibility happening as far back as in its earliest and greatest creators (Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes). In them is a note of fragility, a lingering doubt about the viability and desirability of their own creative endeavors. Great writers, Lionel Trilling once wrote, know they have not “conquered the material upon which they direct their activity,” while lesser artists “feel they have said the last word.”3 Great art knows its weakness; weak art paradoxically does not. Though there is no saying whether this principle holds true universally, I have reasonable confidence that it makes sense of the modern era—that there lies behind the modern masterpiece a workshop of insecurity and doubt about the very pursuit of art. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace eight times before he surrendered his final draft to the publisher. This means that there once existed seven lesser War and Peace’s—seven failures that still run through the sinews of the eighth offspring. Though we rely on Tolstoy’s judgment to vouch that the eighth War and Peace is better than its abandoned siblings, there is no absolute certainty that the eighth version isn’t a draft saved from the paper basket by resignation or a deadline. Three cheers for deadlines and resignation, then, and also for the faithless friend who ignored Kafka’s dying wish that all his unpublished writings (that means just about everything) be burned. Here was a corpus of modern masterpieces which, according to the person in the best position to know, ought not to exist. Whoever has spent time around art and literature, or read the writings of artists, knows that the idea of mastery is part myth and part reality. It is real because, say, War and Peace is a more worthwhile accomplishment than my latest grocery list or this book; and it is a myth because the artist at work is not the artist who has finished the work. The man who wrote the eighth War and Peace didn’t know that this would be the eighth and final War and Peace. Likewise, the man who got down to create Hamlet was not yet the man who has successfully engendered Hamlet. The Shakespeare to whom we owe the play is not yet its author, is not yet “Shakespeare.” The creator who will someday be the author of Hamlet but at the moment is entangled in compositional worries

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and riddles, and not yet the master who has worked them out—this person is the real creator of Hamlet. This idea led me to the following hypothesis: if Hamlet or any work of art or literature is the product of an intention yet unfulfilled, it may well be that this sense of imperfection and frustrated progress is as much a shaping force as the one conventionally associated with the making of art, which is creative power. Could it be that Hamlet (to name the work that sparked my reflection) is in some fashion about the travails of its maker? By which I mean not that a work of art or literature is a portrait of its creator (though it cannot help being that too); what I mean is that a work of art is the product of its creation or (and to show that this is not the platitude it seems) that a work of art is the product of its being created and that it carries in its every contour and meaning the adventure of its being made. Connecting a further dot, it occurred to me that the way in which a work of art or literature ponders the drama of its being made is in fact an exploration of its internal modernity. By internal modernity I mean not how a work of art metabolizes the styles and ideas favored by modern culture; instead I mean the ways in which a work of art or literature attends to its own creation and embraces the now-ness (etymologically, the modern-ness) of its making. Internal modernity, as I understand it, is a way in which a work of art watches its own birth pangs. It sets a work of art anxiously facing the adventure and trial and peril of not yet being a work of art, let alone a masterpiece. This internal modernity sheds light on the outer, broadly and historically understood, modernity. It asks to consider whether modern art is, at its very core, a form of dissatisfaction, doubt, and restlessness about making art as it happens. Is modern art a way of being dissatisfied with art—of wanting more from it, yet despairing of obtaining it, and drawing from this despair a kind of a creative fuel? We know that great achievements can come of losing one’s way and stumbling in blind alleys. Is modern art the sort of achievement that holds in its heart of hearts a glowing core of doubt, an unresolved “to be or not to be” about art? Certainly we are familiar with Modernity the Questioner. Such a character is what the term “modernity” signifies—a rejecter of the olden ways, a dismantler of prevailing practices in politics, religion, morality, social hierarchy, commerce, technology, industry, and so on. After the dismantling, there comes the great adventure of piecing the elements back together in new thrilling configurations. Modernity the Questioner is therefore an original, a creative, an eccentric spirit. Great hope was vested in this adventure. But as with every adventure, especially undertaken by so doubting a character as Modernity, difficulties arise; doors open onto brick walls; resolution falters and goals grow dim, particularly when, as is necessarily the case with genuine creation, the outcome isn’t a foregone destination. In comes the mirror twin of Modernity the Questioner: it is Modernity the Questioner of the Questioner.

INTRODUCTION

5

This character—the Modern who is unhappy with the conditions of modernity—I found living, not only on the top branch of Modernist, postModernist, and contemporary art but already in the undergrowth of the High Renaissance period. That scholars frequently refer to this historical phase as the “early modern period” shows that, notwithstanding Virginia Woolf’s idea that “on or about December 1910 the human character changed” to find that it lived in a modern(ist) world, these changes had long been aborning, and the shock of 1910 was the release of pent-up pressures building all the way back to the mid-sixteenth century. This, by now, is a familiar thesis—see, among the more recent and better known titles, Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (2000) and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012). My intention has not been to add documents to the thesis that the basic groundwork of modernity was laid in the late Renaissance. My interest is with the psychological additives in that foundational cement. Though it is generally agreed that, in this instance, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes pushed art toward a modern sensibility, it remains to be seen how they themselves dealt with their own modernity. Was theirs a mood of giddy conquest and bold experimentalism and discovery? Or was the mood strained, conflicted, hesitant, and, to use a catchall word, problematic? Hamlet is certainly a modern though he is certainly not happy for it, nor is Quixote, and certainly not Michelangelo. As I studied these works, it grew clear to me that Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Cervantes were also critics of artistic modernity. In them is a dawning consciousness of the rights and endowments of art; in them also we sense disappointment with these powers. These three creators tangle with new beliefs concerning art and the creative personality. Their works ride on the emancipation of creative expression, yet at the same time contend with its contradictions. Each in his own way expresses the newfound powers of art and its infirmities. Of interest in these early modern creators, therefore, is not just that they adumbrate modernity; they also demystify it. Indeed, this demystification— to give another turn of the screw—is what, in my view, made art finally modern. To the effect that modernity isn’t merely a cult of creativity, it is this cult and the disenchantment that comes in the wake of insolvent great expectations. The yearning to make more than art out of art is bound to fall through, as is the yearning to escape the boundaries of expression by means of expression. When disillusionment sets in, the artist turns against the artistic medium. This internecine rebellion is, in my view, the inner fire of modernity. In this light, modern art is much more than the triumph of a style (say, of novelty over conformity, creative freedom over technical mastery, etc.); it is also a rebellion against the nature, the artificiality, and the rationale of art. Thus for the overarching direction of Part One (“What Made Art Modern”) of this volume, it nonetheless comes with a disclaimer. No study

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THE LEGENDS OF THE MODERN

of such legends of Western culture as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes can ignore the five centuries of hothouse cultivation that have made them some of the most researched, analyzed, and storied personalities of the pantheon. Therein the newcomer should not tread without apologizing for his belatedness vis-à-vis the great minds that have come before him and whom there aren’t enough days in a life to digest. The Johnny-come-lately will not advance his “newest” interpretation without some suspicion that somewhere on the groaning shelves of Shakespearean or Michelangelo studies or Cervantismo there is a paragraph that beautifully encapsulates his laborious purpose. The modern scholar is a living contradiction: our job is to insure the transmission of past culture on the one hand, but we live in a society that asks that we reinvent the past every decade. As scholars we are to master the knowledge of our topic; as modern scholars, we are required to produce a new take on the oldies. The problem is that the first obligation smothers the second. For novelty needs innocence. We must know enough to be well informed and avoid errors and truisms; yet too much time correlating and corroborating every insight means we will lose sight of our purpose. In practical terms, then, one must compromise. In this spirit have I acquainted myself with the main streams and tributaries of the critical literature; yet in the same spirit I have not studied these critical sources to gloss them but to verify that I am putting forward neither banal nor misguided. The place of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes in this study is not a terminus ad quem, an end in itself, but a gateway to an essay on the fragility of modernity, a fragility that surfaces in their works yet finds its debouchments beyond them, and are essayed in Part Two of this volume. *

*

*

Part Two, “What Makes Modern Art,” marks a shift in gears and lays out a more synoptic, theme-organized interpretation of artistic modernity—to mean, the arts, literature, and culture of the post-aristocratic age, roughly from the late eighteenth century to this day. The modern sensibility produces artistic forms that are extremely conscious of their own conditions of expression, yet are also dissatisfied with these conditions, and wary of their own creative freedom. Already in the High Renaissance, we observe works of art that betray a certain impatience with art-making and cultivate imperfection and the unfinished. This tendency holds in abeyance until the Romantic period when, as it were, some kind of cultural pressure valve finally blows its top. The arts are “liberated”—free to be authentic and autonomous and bold and cheeky and rebellious and impulsive and extempore. Spontaneity and gaucheness bespeak genius, and as poems and paintings contain errors, flaws, lucky breaks, and aphoristic odds and ends, so they seem the more genuinely artistic for it. As such, modernity seems a rebellion against artful form itself. A poem is never finished, only abandoned,

INTRODUCTION

7

Paul Valéry reflected (and Leonardo supposedly said about painting). A painting, Picasso averred, is a sum of destructions, of old mistakes corrected by fresh new ones. “In art, the greatness of the masters does not consist of not making mistakes. Their mistakes, or rather their oversights, are not the same as those of ordinary, run-of-the-mill artists” (Gauguin);4 “Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them” (Dalí);5 “Do not fear errors. There are no errors” (Miles Davis). This liberation of failure, which in fact haunts Hamlet and the works of Michelangelo and the resigned rhapsody of Don Quixote, was my first clue into the discourse of modern art. How, I wondered, had the modern age come to the “in-art-there-are-no-mistakes” persuasion? This question tugs at a whole raft of other ideas and assumptions—the so-named legends. For example, it struck me that the new desirability of error links up with a cultural penchant for novelty. They who dutifully tread the old path don’t get lost, but they never strike gold as well. Errancy is novelty. “Nothing is at the same time both new and perfect,” said the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti.6 If imperfection is the price to pay for youthful novelty, the moderns were more than willing to pay it. The Legend of Failure—to follow the course of my reflection—therefore was entwined with the Legend of Novelty, which, in turn, wove around other threads. For instance, it is clear that, being a break from the past, newness is no easy step. To happen, emancipation must be a goal worth seeking, which means that it must be underpinned by a general opinion that freedom, especially individual freedom, is an undisputed good. “Mistakes are joyful, truth infernal,” said the French writer Albert Camus:7 errors carry an air of optimism and boldness and liberty, while the correct path is restrictive. Error is on the side of freedom, and freedom is the auspices under which we moderns grow and thrive and also make art: an art which, as often as not, celebrates its tutelary spirit, Liberty. This Legend of Freedom doesn’t stand on its own. It rests on a philosophy which says that the human spirit naturally inclines to stray and soar and that we are nature-born creators—happiest when creating and expressing ourselves. Out comes the Legend of Creativity, which holds that, given our inborn creative proclivity, art is the spiritual home of humanity and that modern art epitomizes the wondrous fecundity of the human mind. From the legend that creativity is naturally free and that its sanctuary is art, other stories derive—stories about the means of liberating our inborn creative spark. Error, as we have seen, is not only one of those means but also Destruction and Subversion—two legends which show modern art, now standing on the slain body of tradition, now undermining the society that upheld tradition. Subversion, once it gets going, builds a momentum of its own which isn’t complete until it subverts the subverters and their Romantic legends of creativity, freedom, rebellion, and erratic fertility. These legends, it is found, have woven an institutional straightjacket, a cult of art, which

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newer artists are called to overthrow, lest they prove to be less than free, creative, and bold. A final legend is born: the Legend of the End of Art. *

*

*

This quick roundup indicates that the legends of modern art form a system with obvious ramifications in modern society. Freedom, creative destruction, novelty, trial by error, open-ended progress, the disavowal of tradition, the apocalyptic hope of transcending history—these are not just artistic legends; they are ideologies that have transformed the Western and non-Western world over the last two hundred years. To study them in their artistic form is also to better understand them in their political, moral, scientific, and technological forms. The reader should know why, given their social efficacy, I have chosen to call these ideas “legends.” The reason is that, unlike the words “notions,” “myths,” “fictions,” “fables,” or “conceits,” “legend” conveys not just the art-making but also the society-making potential of these ideas. The word derives from the Latin legendus, gerund of legere—to read, to collect, to fit together. Legends are things that we read about, things made of words, and habits of the tongue and of the mind. They are also aggregators; they weld floating sentiments together, capture the general attention, and channel social purpose. Legends are fabricated and fabricating: they are made of figments of thought and imagination on the one hand; on the other, they produce social realities, explain the world, organize communities, and make moral sense. The medieval church related the life stories of those spiritual heroes that peopled the “holy legend” of Christianity. The holy legend was a mix of history, folk tale, and interpretation of saints and saintly deeds and miracles. To this day, people are called “legends” for a similar reason— athletes, explorers, entrepreneurs, activists, and artists about whom much is said and rumored and imagined under a nimbus of historical relevance and community. A legendary artist likewise personifies aspects of the holy legend of modern art. We maintain legends up, and they maintain us in return. The dual character of a legend (fictive yet society-building) is reflected in the jointly critical and constructive strands of my argument. The former pieces apart the assumptions of modern aesthetic discourse; the latter brings out the historical and sociological uses of these assumptions. *

*

*

“Legend” will perhaps suggest that the author of this book offers himself as a demystifier. This would be correct only insofar as modernity itself demystifies, which means that in the fullness of time it turns on its own legends. We could say that modernity has the peculiar duty to look at itself as if from the outside and act on the realization that we inhabit a cultural

INTRODUCTION

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horizon that is only one among many and by no means the horizon that contains every azimuth. As such, my study of the legends of modern art is the skeptical, impartial spirit of modernity in action. The point is not to rebel against the cultural foundation of modern arts; one cannot rebel against what’s done; the point is to understand it and to strive for a clear picture of what we believe in, what concepts stir us into action, and how these actions serve our practical purposes. If this involves demystification, that is only because it is in the nature of explanations to dispel auras. The demystifying and self-demystifying edge of modernity is prominent in the story of The Unknown Masterpiece, a novella by Honoré de Balzac that guides the explorations of Part Two of this volume. Written at the cusp of the Romantic fever in 1831, The Unknown Masterpiece has been hailed for its prescience and for heralding abstract art and the avant-garde. This may well be so, though Balzac had no intention of being oracular. His aim was to chronicle the public and private stirrings of present society. When he enthuses over the Romantic sublimities of art, he also pragmatically tallies the cultural balance sheet. The Unknown Masterpiece tells us what happens to art when it overreaches and overstates and overthinks itself: it hits a wall (of painting, of expression, of language). This wall, in the tale, takes the form of a mishmash of paint which, to mid-twentieth-century readers of Balzac, looked like a prediction of modern abstract art. And, to be sure, Balzac does call the painter of the unknown masterpiece a “genius.” But the abstractlooking mishmash is not the masterpiece in question. This masterpiece is buried under the philosophic fastidiousness of an overpainting painter who, a genius though he may be, engenders a failure. The Unknown Masterpiece hangs between the “grandeurs” and “misères” of modern art, showing its inner fire, its youthful drive, and its height-scaling ambition. It also shows the risk of self-combustion in Icarus’s flight and what happens to an art that interrogates and complicates itself to the point of negation and ruin. Above all, The Unknown Masterpiece shows us a facet of Romantic-modern art that often gets buried in the wild rhetoric of genius, inspiration, creativity, and insurrection. It is the “fear of decadence”—a word used here in the scientific sense to mean, simply, that which knowingly comes downstream or afterward. Romanticism is arguably the first of the self-consciously rebellious cultural shocks that rock modernity nearly on the dot on every generation. Severance with the past, historical reboot, utopian reinvention, individual liberation, transcendence, and sublimity, these were the stuff of the Romantic revolution. But so was the fear of decadence. The obsessive need to overcome tradition is enough to turn anyone into a decadent. It is no coincidence if the literary critic Harold Bloom’s seminal study of Romantic and modern poetry, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), revolves around the oppressed feeling of historical and creative belatedness. Romantic, and more generally modern, literature according to Bloom has two fixations: one, the making of literature itself; the other, the drive to bury, jettison, or silence predecessors. In essence,

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Bloom’s anxiety-of-influence idea was a theory of decadence; it describes what happens to art forms transfixed by the awareness of standing in the shadow of a heyday, whether real or imagined. At the time of writing The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom was an American critic of Whitmanesque temper not especially inclined to the tragic sense of life (his mood has since changed). Great poetry to him was victory over the abortive shadows gathered around the cradle. Great art is anxious, competitive, combative—fully in the spirit of Nietzsche (another decadent) who said that “every talent must unfold itself in fighting.”8 For Bloom there was no question but that art springs from victory; that it trounces the troops of tradition; that it is a word of triumph. The strong poet never gives in: his “true priority” is always “health,” health which consists of fulfilling his “desperate insistence on priority.”9 Well might this insistence be “desperate.” For whoever picks a fight with tradition gives pride of place to it. True priority, if there is ever such a thing, knows nothing of priority; it unfolds itself in a vacuum. The insistence on priority, on novelty, on rebellion, on “heresy” (to use Peter Gay’s description of the Modernist Geist) is a decadent wish.10 I share Bloom’s insight that modernity elbows its way onto a crowded stage. I find food in his idea that modern art is obsessed with the belatedness of “the now” with respect to then. But I am not sure that great art must consist of asserting priority, of vanquishing or betraying ancestors. This is an Oedipal (read: Freudian, another strand of Modernist myth-making) prejudice which, on balance, is responsible for a great deal of pseudo-emancipated art devoid of the mortal sense of life wherein human expression fetches its deepest echoes. As I understand it, modern art is vibrant paradoxically because it is decadent: a song of freedom and power and priority and sublime assertiveness, yes, but all of it unfolding in a chrysalis of doubt. The overarching mood of modern art is not strength but weakness, or more specifically the fear of weakness, of not making it, of all the thousand things, inner and outer, which hinder creativity. Art since 1800, to take a round date, is permeated by a doubt as to the viability and desirability of its own expression. Modern art expresses this debility precisely by the vehemence of its representations to the contrary, to wit, its postures of rebellion, novelty, radical freedom, heresy, subversion, and so on. A posture is generally taken to be an empty show, and so my choice of word is not altogether right. The legends of modern art may be vainglorious, but they are not empty or unfruitful. As we shall see time and again, the possession of such shaky ideas is what causes the marvelous and bizarre efflorescence of modern art. Its legends are illusory stuff, yes, but wrong ideas are no obstacle to artistic creation. Thus can an art of Alexandrian confusion be as rich and beautiful as the art of Athenian confidence. Having reached this point, I may be asked whether this book jumps on the train of modern culture as other volumes of its kind do. It is rare, after

INTRODUCTION

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all, to come across a book on modernity which, written by a modern, doesn’t cheer for modernity. To this, I will answer that, if my arguments sometimes rasp on the modern sensibility, I cannot wish the effect undone because it is not the business of cultural analysis to praise or condemn. My task is to establish as full a picture of the modern mind as possible. Proximity to an artistic epoch does not put one under the obligation to praise it, and there is no more compelling reason why on principle my enthusiasm toward recent artistic history should be warmer or cooler than toward any other. It is true that historical proximity will involve ruffling feathers attached to live reputations. Yet these stakeholders, if truly they are modern, will know that it is fully in the spirit of Modernism that it should not exempt itself from the critical treatment it showers on all things. My aim has been to rely on this spirit which, lest it betray itself, cannot recoil in censorious traditionalism. A modern traditionalist is too much of a contradiction even for the Modernist to countenance. Modernism is inveterately intellectual, and it has enough of critical reason and historical understanding to know that it is not a terminus of cultural development but one which, like all cultural movements, plows its own field until it yields no more. My outlook, in sum, harkens to that of the arch-modern Nietzsche who thus instructed a critic: “It is not necessary that one take sides for me; on the contrary, a dose of inquisitiveness would seem to me to be an incomparably intelligent stance.”11 Nietzsche of course also instructed that we think with feeling, and no doubt I have my own sentiments about modern and contemporary art, which range from adulation to indifference. I would not pretend that personal enthusiasm has no bearing in the discussion of art—indeed it is insincere to claim objectivity in any judgment of an artistic work. We are guided by our interest, and our interest is tinctured by affect. Anyone armored in a perfectly impersonal response to art may be suspect of having no response and no sense whatsoever of art. This said, the reader is justified in expecting that a book such as this one is neither a tirade nor a dithyramb. I have composed this book fully in the service of this expectation, and the job was facilitated by the fairly sociological vision of this book. Briefly put, it is the view that a society creates and nurtures the sort of art that serves its aims. To be plain, a society has the arts that it wants and needs. As such, it is pointless to praise or condemn any art without wishing that its historical seedbed should have been different than what it was. While this may be a wish for the moralist to entertain, it is not a basis for the historian of ideas to go on. My feelings about modern art, such as they are, bow to my greater purpose, which is to understand how and why we get the art that we want. This is the spirit in which I now invite us to turn to the arts of our worried modernity.

PART ONE

What Made Art Modern

1 Hamlet, or Art against Itself

There is a word for when things go frightfully wrong: tragedy. Murphy’s law, the awareness of inherent failure, the sense that every human life is prey to reversal, suffering, and defeat—in art it finds expression in the tragic mode. This mode of expression has long fascinated thinkers. Aristotle noted the paradox that consists of our seeking spectacles of death, futility, and pain which we avoid in real life. Aristotle did not wonder whether there was a link between art and tragedy other than art being a vehicle of tragic representations. But the question is worth asking: Do artistic expression and tragedy make a pair? Is art tragic—in the sense that art deals intimately with the insufficiency of existence, and our expressive insufficiency in conveying this existential insufficiency? To this line of inquiry we can add a further question: Is the recognition of this double insufficiency (one existential, the other representational) a peculiarity of the modern sensibility? To explore these questions, we turn to a play that is the seedbed of the legends of modern art—a tragedy, as it happens, which recounts an existential failure and agonizes about its being, just perhaps, an artistic failure: Hamlet.

A most certain failure A word of caution: it is not lightly that one puts Hamlet and artistic failure in the same sentence. For a failure it clearly isn’t, not in every way. I should more accurately say, and reassure the reader, that Hamlet is plagued by its awareness of failing certain dramatic and aesthetic expectations and yet, out of this inner torment, produces a work of art of superlative power and beauty and indeed strangeness—a strangeness full of patterns (let’s call them “legends”) that make its artistry recognizably modern. To my discharge, the “failure” of Hamlet isn’t a novel idea. Admirers of the play have politely acknowledged its “problems” as far back to the seventeenth century—problems that have to do with seasickness-inducing

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tonal swerves, a shifty plot, a dilatory momentum, and an abrupt, bathetic finale. Restoration essayists denounced its limp and “spotty” plot.1 Lord Shaftsbury, who esteemed the play as much as the next man, noted how oddly depopulated the play was, with “only one character” monopolizing the attention and swallowing up the plot:2 a plot both scant and disloyal to its premise of avenging a king,3 a plot which someone of William Hazlitt’s authority questioned whether it was theatrical at all, “there [being] no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage” to the point that “Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted.”4 A tragedy that doesn’t really work on stage and a title character hardly playable: this doesn’t bode theatrical gold. Witness the bowdlerized stagings quasi-universally visited on the text—seldom presented in toto, often reshuffled. More recently, T. S. Eliot suggested that, in spite of its being the most admired and oft-staged Shakespearean play, Hamlet is “most certainly an artistic failure.”5 Such flaws and failures are assumed to befall the play by chance or absence of mind. But this, in my view, is far from certain; I put it to the reader that the genius of Hamlet lies in wishing these complications on itself and thereby inventing a new theater and a new, modern sort of art. Hamlet, I aim to show, is a deliberately misbegotten drama playing on the prince’s rejection of the part foisted upon him. And not just the part but also the stage, his own fictional existence, indeed the very idea of fiction. Hamlet is not just a misfit prince; he is fundamentally alien to the aesthetic existence that sustains him. *

*

*

Not that the play is without dramatic spice: there is a ghost, a murder most foul, a manslaughter most foolish, madness, a suicide, pirates, a brawl in a grave, a military invasion, and a bloodbath to top it all. Yet these events seem to tumble by accident or in half-hearted indulgence of tired theatrical conventions. It was Lytton Strachey’s view that “Shakespeare in his last years was half enchanted by visions of beauty and half bored to death.”6 Of the enchantment of Hamlet, we know plenty. That this enchantment is laced with theatrical disenchantment merits looking into: it is the notion that, brilliant as it is, the play springs from deep skepticism about the theater and the whole rigmarole of figments and fancies. None, on this score, is more doubtful than the tardy prince. Why, he asks in mid-play, am I yet to plan my revenge? What keeps me from the fray and the play I am sworn to enact? Here we catch the lament of a playwright who wonders why he can’t or won’t deliver the goods—the goods, that is, of a rip-roaring revenge play. This artistic blockage (for such is the name of the legend thereby invented) is constitutive of the play, and the doubt whether Hamlet should be staged pushes the play into an age its maker had of course no idea of: the age of modern art.

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Psychodrama Denmark, the stage, his role: these are too small for Hamlet’s overflowing mind. He complains of “lack[ing] advancement” (III.ii.333);7 Denmark to him is a prison (II.i.43). Of course, if Denmark had a voice, it might say that it, in fact, is imprisoned by Hamlet’s all-encompassing egotism. The stage, the plot, the intrigue are canopied over by the pale cast of his thoughts, his voluble soliloquies, his meditations. He speaks two-thirds of the lines, and the remaining third are still mostly about him—him and his mad, mysterious moods. None of these moods is more mysterious, at least to himself, than the reason of his strange procrastination. Why won’t Hamlet avenge his father’s murder? This question worries not only him, the prince, but generations of his admirers. Traditionally there were three possible explanations. One was emotion (the prince is too noble, delicate, and intellectual a nature to stoop to bloody vendetta); the other, morality (Hamlet agonizes over the unlawful unchristianity of revenge); and the last, feasibility (regicide is complicated). Then in 1904 the great critic A. C. Bradley knocked these explanations by showing chapter and verse: one, that the prince is as bloody-minded a thug as the next Tudor; two, that he unambiguously regards revenge as the moral thing to do (I.i.67–69); and three, that he, by his own reckoning, has every practical means and opportunity to do the deed (IV.iv.45). With these rationales gone, Bradley produced his own, psychological, explanation: the root of Hamlet’s tardiness, he says, is the psychopathology of the Edwardian bourgeois family—something to do with a feckless libidinal mother casting a shadow on her male child. I take Bradley’s point that the riddle of the play is psychological. But rather than a matter for the family therapist, it strikes me that not the depicted milieu but the depicting one, that is, the stage, is at the root of Hamlet’s unhappiness. The Hamlet problem is artistic. *

*

*

The question as to why Hamlet can’t get on with the revenge plot depends, as far as he is concerned, on the question of who he is. If he can answer that, the rest will follow. But personal identity is a conundrum to the prince. His first line in the play has him say that he is “a little more than kin, and less than kind” (I.ii.65). Never a plain “I am,” Hamlet is more and less this and that, a scion but not a kind one, which is a strange kind of kin—and perhaps not a kind at all. His second line adds that he is “too much in the sun” (I.i.67): too much in the glare of footlights, in the noonday of the stage that has him be too much of a son: a son to Claudius; a son to the Ghost, whose name he bears; and a son to Shakespeare whose quill circles overhead. This is an odd feeling: How can he feel too much in the sun of princeship

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THE LEGENDS OF THE MODERN

when theatrical princeship is the only life he has ever known? What kind of character complains of being a character? A new kind, premiered by Hamlet who is a kind all his own: one who would rather not be what the dramatis personae says he is. But in this sense the cause of his grief is really existential. It is the very ground he stands on, his being made of such stuff as dreams are made of: fiction. Hence his third spoken line. In response to his mother’s remark that he seems downcast, Hamlet retorts, “Seems, madam. Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’” (I.ii.76). This must go down as one of the oddest remarks on the Western stage. The prince will have us know that he doesn’t do playacting and that he scorns the human and animal expression of thoughts and feelings: “These indeed ‘seem,’ for they are actions that a man might play; but I have that within which passeth show” (I.ii.83–85). Does Hamlet know that he hereby disqualifies himself for the stage? For that which passeth show is alien to drama. There, to be is to seem. It’s been said that “Hamlet is popular because he draws attention to a private, inaccessible part of ourselves— reminds us that my social identity never captures the authentic me.”8 This is both true and irrelevant. For if Hamlet is in search of an inner authentic self, he had better look elsewhere—beyond the stage and beyond representation, which means outside of the only ecosystem he can live in. Drama is a public medium; in it the self publicizes and to this extent travesties itself. The consummate players of the Shakespearean universe, kind and unkind, know this; for example, take Iago’s “I am not what I am” (Othello I.1.64) and Viola’s “I am not what I am” (Twelfth Night, III.1). What these protagonists mean is “I am not what I seem.” But rightly they say “am” instead of “seem” because on stage one is not what one seems. Though he probably knows this, as well as Viola and Iago, Hamlet is offended by the necessity of seeming. The stage is beneath him; it is a den of inauthenticity. Thus, he is at war with fiction, which for a fictional character is awkward, not to say tragic. It is the tragedy of Hamlet and, in fact, one of the tragedies of modern art. *

*

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Thus begins the threnody of the prince who would not be one and rues his stay on the stage. After the scene where his mother and uncle request that he play the obedient son on Denmark’s new stage, Hamlet Senior asks him to play yet another role of dynastic obedience—that of avenging son. The prince accepts the part, as the script will have it, but his ambivalence drips through the lines. “Thy commandment alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain” (I.v.102–03), he tells Hamlet Senior. Not in the fire and light of his guts but by the prompt cards of his memory, does he vow to obey. The latter, he calls, a tad legalistically, “my tables” (i.e., writing tablets) (I.v.107). And after swearing duty, he yet whispers this aside: “The time is out-of-joint. O cursèd spite that ever I was born to set it right” (I.v.191–92).

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Notice it’s not the usurpation he bemoans; it is having to avenge it. What spiteful authority, what accursed Will, has it that I must act this part so crudely contrary to my wish to keep my pristine authentic self above role and function? That his entrapment by a role and stage is reason for Hamlet’s melancholia brooks little doubt. He himself says so, I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (II.ii.295–303) The earth’s frame and promontory—or, shall we say, the proscenium and stage of the only earth he knows of, the Globe Theatre, the Earth playhouse: this is the bane of his life. Overhanging this promontory is a “firmament”— nay, Hamlet corrects himself, a “roof fretted with golden fire,” as we know the roof of the Globe Theatre to have been spangled in gilt. This ceiling was then known as “the heavens.”9 A fine venue, to be sure, though to Hamlet whose intellect scorches through any sort of enchantment, “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” (Pungent was the crowded parterre during the close summer months: it isn’t for nothing the trade word for the groundlings was “stinkards.” Caesar faints at the smell of them who have come to acclaim him. Well might he. “Pestilent” was no hyperbole: those plague-carrying vapors often forced London playhouses to shut down during the hot season.) From this trap of a role (the thing wherein is caught the conscience of a prince) comes the panoply of Hamlet’s neuroses (resentment, claustrophobia, dreams of self-harm, animosity, life-weariness). His most interesting neurosis is more artistic in nature and revolves around his detestation of semblance, which means, of his own theatrical self. His rage to expurgate seeming from his existence, this mad pursuit of authenticity, leads him to iconoclasm—the destruction of images, and specifically those of the stage. One way he goes about this destruction is through self-parody, by overacting the part.

Character failure Following his pledge to the Ghost, Hamlet swears his companions to secrecy: not a word must they breathe of what they have seen. This oath Hamlet drags over a long and repetitious mummery: swear, swear, swear on this sword, and swear yet again. Methinks he doth protest too much—covering up his tepid resolve under the histrionics of confederacy. This sets a pattern

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of action for the next acts: Hamlet the unhappy actor decides to overact. “Make you out this matter out that I essentially am not in madness but mad in craft,” he says (III.iv.189–90). That he is mad in pretense (“in craft”) is in the plot; that he is mad out of craft basically describes acting (which is a form a madness, of self-alienation, of two- or three- or four-mindedness depending on how many roles an Elizabethan actor was billed to play); but Hamlet is mostly mad at craft. He has looked into the hollow heart of fiction, and himself hollowed by disaffection, he takes revenge by sending up the whole business of acting. Switching into thespian overkill (his so-called madness), he cycles in dizzying succession through the roster of possible roles (lover, avenger, abstinent scholar, adventurer, stoic) and contrary moods (trustful but skeptical, loving and loveless, kind and cruel, thuggish but hypersensitive, ambitious yet resigned, a wit and a churl, a bawd and a scold, etc.). He smothers the stage in logorrhoea, gallops across the verbal octaves from sublime to grotesque with staggering disregard for sense and purpose. In sum, Hamlet parodies acting; he means to be a ham—the ham being the second-best killer of fiction and problematizer of art after the iconoclast. *

*

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How to act a prince made mad by the consciousness of acting? How does one play overacting? Every director and actor who ponder the cursed role must be alive to this quandary. An error is to wrap the “antic disposition” (I.v.8) in the toga of sincerity. This would misconstrue the essential insincerity of Hamlet, a person who cannot hold to an emotion longer than the breath it takes to express it. Thus, an actor will perhaps want to perform the prince in the spirit of Hazlitt’s remark that Hamlet isn’t a role that carries well beyond the page: with resigned incompetence. Cleopatra worries about the generations of bungling boy players who will reprise her role on the stages of posterity. Hamlet’s worry should be that someday a well-meaning thespian will get up to performing him with sincerity. Hamlet is a poor player (to borrow from Macbeth), and he stands too much outside of his role to deliver anything else than a dubious, reluctant, half-hearted performance—so he himself admits. In a play-within-a-play moment, Hamlet performs a little speech before a visiting troupe of actors. Polonius, whose judgment has a knack of being off-the-mark, reckons him a fine actor, “with good accent and good discretion” (II.ii.461–62), but the professional players in the room demure. Perhaps they know that Hamlet is a ham, that he is saddled with the self-consciousness of the modern character, that of being “a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage” (Macbeth V.v.24–25). And however ragingly he struts and frets, Hamlet feels only disgust for his own performed incompetence. His exposure of the falsity of all acting adds, rather than removes, a layer of falsity. What a sorry sight I am, he rails, that I who should be honoring my dear father murder’d, “must like a whore

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unpack my heart with words and fall a-cursing like a very drab” (II.ii.581– 82). Words, words, words, and no swordplay. But note the “must” in “must like a whore unpack my heart with words”: one who is on stage belongs to language and plays by its “tables.” Bemoaning language is no way to escape it, nor will exposing the act get him any closer to dismantling it. The only thing that can dismantle drama is silence. Hamlet yearns for this silence (“silence” is the last word he utters): the silence of genuine soliloquy, the silence of the poetry book or of the Romantic essay—genres that Hamlet does not know he belongs to yet blindly craves. Meanwhile, and for the rest of his “hour upon the stage,” Hamlet is stuck in fiction—a figure of alienation from medium, context, and society, a poster-boy for the modern creator who feels alienated from language, craft, practice, and taste. Unable to actuate this divorce, Hamlet resorts to another sabotage tactic, which consists of dismantling the heroic figure. For a hero Hamlet is surely designed to be. It is in his name: Hamlet son of Hamlet Senior and of a noble ancestry of Hamlets besides: the Amleth of Saxo Grammaticus twelfth-century saga; the Hamblet of Francis de Belleforest’s sixteenthcentury Hystorie of Hamblet; the Hamlet of the so-called Ur-Hamlet that appeared on the London stage in the mid-1590s. There are lots of Hamlets to live up to. By his own reckoning, the newbie Hamlet of 1601 is a Johna-dreams out of his depth. From his ancestor Amleth he borrows the tactic of affected madness but bungles it horribly (Claudius’s suspicion is aroused, rather than distracted, by his “antic disposition”). Of him it is said that he has a “noble heart,” but Hamlet himself is doubtful. Surely he would laugh at Goethe’s notion that the prince is possessed of “a lovely, pure, and most moral nature.”10 Trust Hamlet to know what he is talking about: “I am myself indifferent honest but yet I could accuse myself of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have though to put them in” (III.i.122–26). This could be morbid modesty except that the plot bears him out: Hamlet is proud; he is pettily revengeful (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vouch for it from the grave), and he who complains of lacking “advancement” nourishes the ambition of no less than overpowering the stage. He is a dangerous man to love or befriend. Ask Ophelia, ask Polonius, ask the rest of the body count (no fewer than eight, which makes him the deadliest of Shakespeare’s so-called heroes): it is statistically safer to be his enemy than his friend. Like many cruel individuals, he can be self-pitying and craven. Especially shabby is his excuse that “madness” made him kill Polonius and destroy Ophelia’s psyche, the very madness he admits was a charade (V.ii.204–17). Of course Hamlet is long on the modern virtues—virtues that might make him heroic to the modern taste: he is exceptionally clever, well-read, scathingly lucid, ironic, and eloquent. But intelligence is a means and does not make a person good nor remedies one’s deficiency in the classical

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heroic virtues (courage, loyalty, mercy, fairness). However colossal, his intelligence and self-consciousness are out of place in his world. Again, it is Hamlet himself who thinks so: against our modern proclivities to applaud his discoursing on the theater and philosophizing about action, life, consciousness, meaning, and so on, Hamlet is resolutely a man of 1600 who does not worship ratiocination. Intelligence is a barrier between him and community, truth, love, and “enterprises of great pith and moment.” The guilt of omission, not pride in cognition, plagues his conscience. Ideas, questions, concepts: these are words only, and words alone, as Claudius remarks, “never to heaven go” (III.iii.98). If anything, Hamlet’s towering intellect teaches him to scorn his role, hence (since a role is all he is) himself. His first soliloquy finds him wishing to slink out of existence: “O that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” (I.ii.129–30). This is not suicide to escape the slings and arrows of life; it is suicide that loathes life itself, the thereness sullied (an alternate reading to “solid” preferred in some editions) by the ignoble desire to be, to stand forth, to persist in its own being (“sallied flesh” according to yet another spelling). The plot that wants him on his feet—it comes to stand for the life of heroic striving. Fruition, fertility, power, the lust of life itself appall him—whether it is his mother’s “increase of appetite” (I.ii.144) or Ophelia’s womb working up to be a “breeder of sinners”—babes bursting to commit the sin of staying alive. “I say we will have no mo’ marriage” (III.1.149). His love of extinction pours its monastic philosophical heart out in the “to be or not to be” speech.

Once an image, always an image Why, the prince wonders, should I live? Why should I submit to the charade of “grunting and sweating under a weary life” (III.i.77)—the charade, in this instance, of playing the prince on this stage? From a dramatic standpoint, the “to be or not to be” question has got to be the least heroic conceivable: it destroys the seriousness of commitment to existence which underpins heroism. Driving a wedge between the person and his persona, the question splits Hamlet off from the play to which he is theoretically consubstantial. It creates a paradoxical, modern sort of heroism, a heroism of social alienation and self-detachment that cleaves fiction from itself: the play trundles along on the one side, and running on the other side is a commentary of sorts, more than kin and less than kind, which observes, questions, reproves, or dismantles the illusion. Through this duality, art seems to want to transcend itself, the same way Hamlet aims to transcend his role and establish a state of consciousness and existence apart from the play. This transcendence is the turn whereby art moved into its modern manifestation; it is the moment when art became modern.

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This turn, which is half the spice and mystique of artistic modernity, nevertheless rests on a fallacy—the fallacy that fiction can transcend itself. And the beauty of Hamlet, and of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, is that it rides on the legend of artistic transcendence and undermines it at the same time. The malcontent prince seems to know that the option of transcending the play is really not open to him. This is what “makes calamity of so long life” (III.i.69): the fact that an image is doomed to the frivolity, the unreality, the exiguity of the fictional world. Note the prince’s words: it’s not canon law that stops him from self-slaughter (Ophelia kills herself but still gets a Christian burial), nor is it his fear of the void. What stops him from suicide is the terror that he may not die enough. It is “the dread of something after death” (III.i.78), a sleep of death that may yet be another, and this time endless, pageant of “dreams.” That is what stops Hamlet’s bare bodkin: the hunch that the next life is yet another stage with other roles and fictions. Hamlet dreads to find out that he will never escape fiction. The Ghost does after all speak of the afterlife as “my prison-house” (I.iv.14), the same way the stage of Denmark is a prison (II.i.43). Horror-struck, Hamlet sees that people like him don’t enjoy the privilege of dying. Death in drama means nothing other than that the run of a character’s performance has found its appointed end. But his fiction will be resuscitated till the last syllable of its stage history, his hour and strut upon the stage reprised time and again. Once an image, always an image. This is the ultimate claustrophobic crisis, the nightmare behind all of Hamlet’s nightmares. It is a warning to all the Romantics and Modernists to come who, by means of images, will seek to transcend into the fabled land of art. Self-consciousness is one of the alembics that made art modern, but it is also the source of its discontent. For self-consciousness does not deliver the liberation from context and medium dearly wished for. When this truth dawns on the artist (and Hamlet is an artist, a would-be artist of his own life, an artist who would rewrite the play in his own image), he puts self-consciousness to the task of sabotage. Since he cannot ride fiction to transcend fiction, he will poison the well; he will make this version of the Hamlet story as inauthentic a revenge play as ever was staged—by stalling it, keeping it barren, abortive, and alive enough “to say ‘this thing’s to do’” and not do it (IV.iv.44). Rotten Denmark has one flaw: it sincerely persists in its being. There Hamlet can strike. He can out-rot the stage with insincerity.

Acting workshop What better way to kill sincerity than to infect the audience with the virus of self-consciousness? Where stagey overacting and wordy dithering may not be globe wrecking enough, there is always the dissolvent of theory (of, etymologically, looking from on high): “Fie upon ’t! Foh! About, my

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brains,” he rallies, racks his brain, then decides to stage a play! “I’ll have these players play something like the murder of my father” (II.ii.590–91). Thus, begins the play-within-the-play episode (in reality two plays within the play: the first, an open rehearsal of a Virgilian drama and the other the Mousetrap, a poisoner-at-court tragedy). “Welcome good friends. O, old friend” (II.ii.418–19), Hamlet says greeting the players. He apportions roles, gives instructions, praises performances of time past, writes a scene and pronounces a speech trippingly on the tongue. Though he hates “seems,” it is not for lack of professional knowledge. His is not a philistine’s dislike of the theater. It is internecine. It is fiction turning on itself—and begetting modern art. The action now firmly on pause, Hamlet-the-stage-director cautions fellow players against the plague of “o’erdoing” it: do not “tear a passion to tatters” and “split the ears of the groundlings” and “out-Herod Herod” (III.ii.1–45). In reality any acting is always too much acting for Hamlet, and he is always pointing out the “act” of his fellow players, taunting Laertes for overplaying a brother’s grief and scolding his mother that her “act” is “hypocritical” (III.iv.40–51). His acting workshop is by no means brief. It runs to almost two hundred lines of dialogue. “This is too long,” Polonius complains (II.ii.438), and most stage productions agree with him and trim or cut it out to protect the thin dramatic intrigue there is. This abridgment quickens the plot but scoops out the artistic heart of the play, which concerns the travails of a man who would not play the prince, and of a playwright who would rather not write yet another revenge play. For when Hamlet rails against emoting and inveighs against the London stage (II.ii and III.ii, more amply in the Folio than Quarto 1), we hear a writer’s dissatisfaction with the modishness and commercial rapacity of the theater world. The critic Richard Lanham’s point that Shakespeare is “writing a play about the kind of play he is writing” needs this further qualification—that Shakespeare is writing about the drudgery of having to produce a revenge play, about his boredom with the genre and with the theater and fiction at large.11 Hamlet’s plea for a more inward, underacted form of theater where the author’s text prevails over the actor’s improvisation (III.ii.37–44) looks forward to the artistic sensibility of complete authorial control where only one consciousness, that of the artist, oversees the imaginary universe. That Hamlet’s creative consciousness is denied this control is of course prodigious good luck: absent the mismatch between him and the stage, and between Shakespeare and his play, Hamlet would have followed the groove of a revenge potboiler such as the Ur-Hamlet probably was (the original play out of which the Hamlet we know was culled and cobbled together). The Shakespearean critic Harold Bloom follows Peter Alexander’s idea that the Ur-Hamlet was in fact Shakespeare’s own and submits that this rewrite involves the playwright’s “self-conscious confrontation with his own botched beginning as a tragic dramatist.”12 Unsatisfactory the Ur-

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Hamlet must have been, at least to Shakespeare’s revisionary eye, but much hangs on the meaning of “botched” beginning. It may be that the Ur-Hamlet worked very well as a revenge play (there is in fact historical evidence to suggest it was a popular play), and that this very functionality is the very reason why it feels second-rate now to the Shakespeare of 1601 whose genius has outgrown certain stage ruts. What was once fit-for-purpose is now confining. On this theory, then, he is not improving on a bad early play: he is destroying a serviceable play whose “uses” have come to feel, to him and to the prince, “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” (I.ii.133).

Will against Will The idea that Hamlet is at war with Hamlet sheds light on the tragedy’s most notorious enigma: Why does the prince dither? It amazes even Hamlet himself—four acts into the play: I do not know Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do, Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To do’t. (IV.iv.43–46) What indeed is he still doing, or not doing, on stage? He asks this under the glowering eye of the ghost—the stage-manager of his existence—who on behalf of the audience is hungry for spectacle. His puzzlement is genuine; his analysis of the situation, as plain and lucid as he is capable of: he has cause, will, strength, and means. Cause because he knows his uncle is truly guilty; strength because he is reckoned an excellent blade in excellent form; means because Claudius doesn’t walk under heavy praetorian guard. Might it be a problem of having the will? Hamlet says he has the will but this may be an elaborate way of apologizing for the weak and dilating plot. To will an act is to act on it. Ordinarily it makes no sense to say, for example, that I will my arm to move but don’t move it unless I am drawing attention to the countervailing action of a greater force: in this instance, Will’s will. Hamlet has the will, but Will (who is not convinced that a revenge play is what he wishes to write at this juncture) trumps it. Sometimes the prince practically sees Big Will pulling the strings against his purpose: Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across? Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face? Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i’ the throat, As deep as to the lungs? who does me this? (II.ii.566–70)

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Who indeed does this to Hamlet? Who ventriloquizes him down from the lungs up to the throat? Makes a mockery of his princeship? Feeds him long speeches that leave everything in the doldrums? We should picture Hamlet flaying at an invisible bee-swarm of Ariels that pluck and tweak him. Thereafter, his antipathy toward puppet masters of any ilk is implacable. Any suspicion that he might be the notes of someone else’s pipe awakens his worst instincts. There is a smoldering war between Hamlet and Will, the collateral casualties of which are half of the play’s body count: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he coldly sends to their death on the charge of playing him (“Sblood,” he snarls, “do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me” (III.ii.360–63); Ophelia, whom he suspects of conniving with the king’s men to have him play the love-mad suitor while they, “lawful espials,” watch; and Polonius who is guilty of setting up the playlet of Hamlet’s chat with his mother. Hamlet slays him for this lawful espying (no better word for theatergoing). Hell hath no fury like an actor enraged, and Hamlet has no mercy for the would-be dramatists and busybody prompters that would have him play. As to the question “Why won’t he act?” an answer suggests itself: because Will the Great, the ex machina ghost who pulls the levers of his “John-adreams” existence, does not want him to. And Shakespeare does not want to because he is in fact hampered by a new consciousness of himself as, no longer just a playwright for hire, but an artist. Being an artist, here, means entertaining certain ideas of creative self-will and autonomy vis-à-vis the medium of expression; it means believing, in a proto-Romantic fashion, that the fictional artifact should spring from a well of whole-hearted personal creative determination; that it should be a product of deep thinking, of, as Hamlet put it, thinking “precisely on th’ event” (IV.iv.41). Now, Hamlet suspects that his failure to advance the play is caused by his overthinking the plot, and he is right. But it is really caused by Shakespeare’s thinking ahead of his time and, therefore wrongly, about the nature of fictional events. He already thinks about fiction in an anachronistically modern-Romantic way that puts him in conflict with the Elizabethan stage. Hamlet embodies the crux of this conflict. Thus, when he wonders why yet he “live[s] to say this thing’s to do” or why he babbles like “a whore” rather than kick like a stallion or why he “peak[s] like John-a-dreams unpregnant of [his] cause,” Hamlet Romantically assumes that he, as the primum mobile of his lifechoices, should be pregnant of his cause; that he mustn’t merely get the job done; that the job should be fully consonant with his inner self. There is a telling hint of this in the scene where the Ghost of Hamlet Senior urges him to stick to his revenge plot. Remember thee? Hamlet answers the Ghost. Why, thy remembrance will occupy my very heart and my soul, it will be me: “Thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and

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volume of my brain” (I.iv.102–03). “Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past . . . and thy commandment all alone shall live.” A Romantic soul (a method actor before his time), Hamlet does not memorize the part. He is the memory. The part is him. This is why he always looks inward to link the act with his inner authentic self. In another scene, he hovers behind his uncle, dagger in hand, ready to deal the avenging strike, wholly certain that the deed is up to him: “Now might I do it pat. Now he’s praying. And now I’ll do ’t” (III.iii.72–73). Now. Now. Now. Hamlet is fascinated by the “now” of a pure authentic decision, one that stems from the will. In fact, he is bewitched by a misapprehension (which runs from Augustine to the Romantics and later existentialism) according to which it takes a free, deliberate, and conscious will to move into action. This is dubious in life, but it is catastrophically wrong in fiction where everything a character does is willed from on high. Hamlet should listen to the counsel of his theatrical acolytes. The Player King says this: Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. (III.ii.206–09) Personal will is no match for fate—not when the said fate is written by Will. Laertes, who has the stoic wisdom of the dependable bit-character, also knows this. About Hamlet he says, His will is not his own; For he himself is subject to his birth: He may not, as unvalued persons do, Carve for himself. (I.iii.17–20) Subject to his birth in ghostly Will, Hamlet has no will of his own. Failing to recognize this and rummaging his inner psyche for a motive (as if he had one), he dithers, frets, falters. Too much free will makes him powerless and, as Samuel Johnson remarked in 1765, at the mercy of everyone (“Hamlet is, through the whole play, rather than an instrument than an agent”):13 he seldom initiates action; he responds to ploys and plays going on around him. Hamlet’s “thinking too precisely on th’ event” is an instance of his wanting to be above the play. He quite simply misconstrues what an event is in his world, that is, in fiction. Properly speaking, there are no events in fiction—not in so far as “event” means, etymologically, “that which comes out” (from the Latin eventus). No fictional occurrence just turns up; rather, everything in fiction is put in—planned, plotted, locked into place. Every so-called event is forestalled by the thought thereof. “The pale cast of thought” overspreads the stage indeed, poisons “the name of action,” turns

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the “currents awry,” and staves off “enterprises of great pitch and moment” (III.1.85ff). That these enterprises of great moment include the play Hamlet finds himself in, and the role he is asked to fulfill, there is no doubt. But this only underscores the point that Shakespeare was preoccupied with the matter of free will as it pertained to his own creation. Hamlet wavering about whether to do or not to do is Shakespeare testing his own creative freedom within the confines (the Denmark) of a potboiler revenge plot. As Hamlet has a ghost who bullies him, so does Shakespeare: it is the bigger ghost of the Globe Theatre and the London public and the obligation to produce a crowd pleaser. The question is, how do you do that?

The stage’s a prison There is a part of Shakespeare, the modern John-a-dreams part, the princeling of a new kind of art, which dares believe that it ought to be a matter of free will, of creativity. But this proto-Romantic half is tempered by a dramatic craft tradition, a wisdom learned on the rehearsal stage and in-house playwriting, which advises that creation is a matter of appropriate behavior. Roughly put, it is the wisdom that by doing what one is supposed to do, one becomes the sort of character likely to do, and to will to do, one’s part. Act and you will be that which you act. Act the avenging prince and you will be one. Brutus of Julius Caesar (elder brother to Hamlet by two years) accepts this wisdom. He becomes a confederate of Caesar’s assassination not by reflecting on whether he has the will to depose the tyrant (another overweening father à la Claudius) and whether the deed connects with his deep self. He becomes a conspirator because Cassius tells him that he already looks and acts the conspirator. He will do the deed because he has always already been acting toward the cause. (Iago is another example of this behaviorism: he initially wills to believe that the Moor has injured him: “I know not if ’t be true, but I, for mere suspicion in that kind, will do as if for surety” (II.i.380–83). Though he decides to act the wronged husband, soon the act engenders the belief. He exclaims that “the lusty Moor hath leaped into my seat, the thought thereof doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards” (II.i.295–97). Iago is caught in the virtuous élan of acting. Playing the part, he becomes it). This philosophy is steeped in the pragmatic wisdom of stagecraft which, in Shakespeare’s days, was nine-part practice to one-part conviction. Thinking about the role, getting into its psychology, sussing out the person behind the lines, exploring one’s personal affinity with the character, these were irrelevant to the practicality of learning the role on short notice even as the ink was fresh on the playwright’s roll.14 Actors were prized for a good memory, for loud and proper diction, not for sincerity. Until, that is, Hamlet.

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He believes that it is the inner, authentic will which produces outward action. He is amazed by fellow actors who, during the play-within-the-play episode, produce good “seems” from a total lack of personal conviction. “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?” (II.ii.539) he wonders: How can an actor cry about a mythical being he has never met? Hamlet cannot accept that the acting produces the feeling. He would like it to be the other way around, like the method actor of the future who thinks he should fuse wholly and sincerely with the inner self of the person he is acting, as if there was a person there, and not a roll of lines. “Try acting,” said an exasperated Laurence Olivier to the young method-acting Dustin Hoffman (who was holding up a shoot protractedly “getting” into character). “Try acting” indeed would spring Hamlet out of his predicament. But then he would be Brutus and not Hamlet; he would not be the poor player who did not want to be on stage. He would not be modern. It is the plight of Hamlet (and the tragic drive of the play) that he is modern against himself. On this score much has been said of his fabled selfconsciousness: of the fact that, as Harold Bloom put it, he “will not allow himself to forget that he is another staged representation.”15 Our Postmodern sensibility takes this self-consciousness to be the great thing about Hamlet and the creative mind behind it. But this may be too triumphalist by half. Shakespeare is a self-conscious writer, to be sure, and this recommends him to our modern-Romantic taste. Yet what speaks through Hamlet is his maladjustment to the dilemmas and difficulties of modernity—of creative freedom, self-reflexivity, and transcendence. We should give equal weight to the part of him who wishes he were not so self-conscious a dramatist. Consider that Hamlet’s “pale cast of thought” is misery to him, not glory; that his “thinking too precisely on th’ event” is a curse; that he admires, not himself and his intellectualism but muscle-man Fortinbras “of unimproved [unrestrained] mettle hot and full” (I.i.99), Fortinbras who gets things done, Fortinbras who is everything that Hamlet wishes he were and hates himself for not being (see IV.iv.30–65) (tellingly it is Fortinbras himself that Shakespeare rewards with a crown at the play’s end). Hamlet, and through him Shakespeare, is an unhappy autonomous mind; he is an unhappy modern. If our ear doesn’t pick this up, it is because we are deafened by the Romantic bombast which from Goethe to Bradley and Bloom harps on about Hamlet’s godlike apprehension—“boundless,” “transcendent,” “sublime,” and “all-but-infinite.”16 But this hyperbole is quite foreign to the practical spirit of Shakespearean playwriting and stagecraft. Hamlet may very well wish himself beyond the page and the stage; yet it is quite another thing to transcend that place. For there is actually no non-fictional place beyond or above the play for Hamlet or Will-the-playwright to repair to. Both are caught up in the “petty pace” of the performance and the Danish prison of the fictional world. That Hamlet chafes at the words, lines, “tables,” and roll that contain him (plays

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were written on paper rolls, whence “role”) does not mean he escapes them. Knowing your prison walls isn’t the same thing as breaking through them, and to yearn for freedom and infinity makes one neither free nor infinite. In truth, Hamlet’s sickness lies in not fulfilling Hegel’s Romantic notion that Shakespearean heroes are “free artists of themselves.”17 If this judgment fits comedic characters (Falstaff, Viola) and villains (Iago, Edmund) well enough, it does not describe Hamlet at all, who is not a master of self-invention and the glib arts of “seems.” The tragic thing about him is how lamentably unfree he is. His “will is not his own [and] may not, as unvalued persons do, carve for himself” (I.iii.17–19); his “tether” is heavier than that of ordinary mortals (I.iii.124–25). No sooner does he appear on stage than he is denied to leave to do what he pleases (“go not to Wittenberg”) in galling contrast to the two other young men of the same scene (Laertes, who is allowed to go and sow his wild oats in France, and young Fortinbras, who flouts his uncle’s will, raises a rebellion, and goes adventuring). Not so Hamlet, who obeys his uncle, cowers under an idealized father figure (I.ii.53–54) and does a ghost’s bidding. “Thou are bound to revenge,” thunders this father; “I am bound to hear,” trembles the son (I.v.7–8). This is not the rhetoric of free self-fashioning. He who curses the fate that ever he was born to avenge father (I.v.196–97) is not looking to a life of self-invention. This precisely is why he is a tragic character—rather than a comic or a villain. Villains and hoaxers tend to control the stage; tragic figures are controlled by it. The former revel in virtuosic playacting; the latter know themselves to be poor players. Witness Coriolanus, another precocious Hegelian Romantic who would like “to stand as if a man were author of himself and knew no other kin” (Coriolanus V.iii.35–37); a man who like Hamlet despises “seems” (Cor. III.ii.ff) and will not dissemble and play-act for the people. (“It is a part that I shall blush in acting,” Cor. II.2.144– 45.) And since he will not parley his presence onto any stage, he sentences himself to incompetence. In the same streak of incompetence we also find Othello whose “free and open nature,” that is, his sincerity, disqualifies him for stagy Venetian intrigue; we also find Richard II who is too fanciful to play his kingship straight, and of course, Macbeth who discovers he does not have the ruthless killer’s lack of conscience that makes for a good king. And together with this sense of maladjustment, of not being able to mold oneself into the expected role, comes the malaise of fictional imprisonment. As Hamlet is beholden to the Ghost’s command, Macbeth is captive to the Weird Sisters’s oracle “here upon this bank and shoal of time” (I.vii.6)—a stretch of time that has its own narrative logic and “creeps at this petty pace . . . to the last syllable” (V.v.20–21). Where the Dane’s strategy is to procrastinate and drag the pace to a crawl, the Thane rushes ahead, overleaps the script, wishing the action done no sooner than it is conceived (“if it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘t’were well it were done quickly”), turning this shortest and most hurried of plays into a destructive tantrum over the

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existence of duration (“Out! Out brief candle!”). We can practically feel Shakespeare fidgeting to be done with the play—rushing plot, pace, and characterization just to nip that candle off. The inescapable time of the play is what “makes calamity of so long life” for Hamlet (III.i.69). Life is calamitous because it lasts, because it shackles a character to the fictional interim between the first line and the last. “All length is torture,” sighs Antony (Antony and Cleopatra IV.xiv.46). Hamlet endures that torture to the hilt; in him, duration becomes pathology: lassitude, protraction, and expectancy. “This is too long,” says Polonius. Well might he. Hamlet feels the rack of acting and existing in time by “thinking too precisely on th’ event” (IV.iv.41)—excogitating what it is to act, to do, to play—a bit like Brutus who in Julius Caesar also ponders the hideousness of temporal existence: “Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is a phantasma, or a hideous dream” (Julius Caesar II.i.63–65). This hideous dream—What is it, in the end, if not the mind watching itself conceiving, envisioning, unfolding a script? So the sufferer-in-chief of that claustrophobic interim is Shakespeare who, though he may feel “noble in reason [and] infinite in faculty,” is all the while confined, trapped, limited to the time and place and strictures of a play in London, at the Globe Theatre, in 1601.

Will against the Globe As long as Shakespeare is writing Hamlet, he is in the “hideous dream” of fiction-making between the “first motion” and “the acting.” This is the hideous dream of artistic midwifery, of putting the play together and making it work. “Fie upon ’t! Foh! About, my brains,” Hamlet says, slapping himself into action. It sounds like the inner hectoring of a playwright who is under a deadline to supply the Chamberlain’s Men with yet another one of those deplorably popular revenge plays—and drags his feet. Hamlet is evidently not a case of writer’s block; in fact, it is something more interesting and transformative than that: it is about writer’s block; it dramatizes the travails of a creative consciousness that has recently awakened to the fact of a split between itself and the expressive medium (here, the stage). It is a rift from which all sorts of dualities (dreams of liberation, nightmares of captivity, maladjustment symptoms, etc.) bedevil and enliven the fictional universe—one to which the word “modern” seems to stick itself. Modern indeed is the split which, especially in Hamlet, enables Shakespeare to objectify his own creative consciousness as a force separate from the substance in which it is actualized. This division is strong enough to suggest that while Shakespeare worked in theater, he was not of the theater. Theater, as we would say today, was only a medium to him.

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Of course, Shakespeare cared deeply about the stage; if Hamlet’s harangue to fellow players is a hint, he had not only passionate views but also, and this is unmistakable, reservations—reservations having to do with the world of “seems.” He appears to have disliked overacting and actors mangling his lines; he seems not to have much affection for the public either—or the hecklers and loudmouths at any rate. There speaks through Hamlet a creative mind that seeks escape from the trappings of drama and fantasymaking: “O God, I could . . . count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams”—say, the bad dream of having to serve a staged dream. Cursed spite that all this kingly intelligence should go to amuse the gallery, to unpack his heart with words like a whore. It is as though, by 1600, Shakespeare’s genius felt strong enough to resent the terms it was given to express itself in. Such revenge dramas on which he honed his pen (witness his Titus Andronicus of 1588–93) now felt unworthy of his time. But Shakespeare was, and remained always, a pen for hire. However much he felt a king of the infinite space of his imagination, his imagination was only so good as the next box office returns. In the cutthroat marketplace of London playhouses, this meant producing twenty plays per season and writing one or two new ones every year. He kept up this fiendish pace over his two decades as playwright-in-residence. It was a remunerative business that gave him prestige and fame. Just the same, it is a profession he had no trouble leaving behind once his fortune was made. And as soon as his stake in the business ended, so did his writing. This, then, may be the unromantic truth about our supreme literary genius: that art was not his whole life but rather a side of it. To the modern mind, this coda is disappointing (“not uplifting” but “merely and disagreeably ordinary,” to quote a recent biographer).18 What is a modern creator if not sincerely and inextricably wedded to art, an artist down to the very marrow? It is unimaginable, outrageous that Shakespeare could have retired from “Art”; he should have been an artist to the last, he should have held fast to that nobility of vision so shockingly foreign to the life of a country squire. How disagreeable. (Up through the 1950s, a not unrelated kind of snobbery consisted of supposing that no son of a glover could have penned such magnificent literature: a great lord, the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon, must have ghostwritten for the plebeian Stratfordian.) In fact, I would submit that the distinction between life and art, or between the artist and the art, is essential to modern art and literature. It is true that writers, poets, painters, and sculptors took on the identity of artists during this early modern period; but “artist” unlike “craftsman” precisely involves the consciousness of a duality between the mind and the work. The former experiences the latter as an alien substance curbs or limits or antagonizes intention—a substance that ought to serve consciousness but in fact resists it, as the play is to Hamlet a basically inimical environment. A creator who is perfectly at one with his craft is a craftsman; a creator who is

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not is, potentially, an artist. Hamlet is too self-conscious and too artist-like to serve the craft of being a stock avenger. “O God, I could count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.” “Dream” in the Shakespearean lexicon is often used to mean fiction, so the prince means here that he is on stage as if in an alien environment. Absent this alienation (whereby, say, Shakespeare is primarily not a man of the stage), modern art does not happen. This dissociation is not uplifting, but modern art seldom is, since it is a crisis in the house of art. *

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Hamlet would be free if he did not have to perform certain fictions, as Shakespeare would be free if he did not have to harness his powers to the retelling of the “Hamlet revenge,” a tried and tired story borrowed from medieval lore and which had been on the boards of the Chamberlain’s Men already in the 1590s. That early, now lost, version was perhaps by Thomas Kyd, perhaps by Shakespeare himself. As revenge plays go, it wasn’t top box office material, and nowhere as popular as Titus Andronicus, The Spanish Tragedy, or Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.19 Why Shakespeare or his company decided to reprise this well-worn story is anyone’s guess, but the result is the streak of impatience and vexation of the Hamlet we know. Shakespeare’s exasperation would be no less if he was the author of the earlier version. For then he would be rewriting himself, which can induce a massive Hamlet-like block of self-overhearing. His creative will of 1601 is blocked by an earlier authorial will. “Cursèd spite that ever I was born to set it right” (I.v.191– 92): cursed job that I, Will the Second, must revive this old plot. Denmark is a prison, and so is Will the First’s poem to Will the Second’s burgeoning text. So that text twists and skulks and drags in the begetting. The coupling of art and incarceration isn’t unique to Hamlet. In The Tempest Ferdinand says, “My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up” (I.ii.592). “Dream” is the intellect in a bound and bewitched state. Dream is the state in which every inmate of The Tempest is thrown, and the island is to all of them a prison. Prospero and his daughter have been several years its captives; Ariel was twelve years the prisoner of a tree until he becomes Prospero’s indentured magician; Caliban is a slave; and the castaways are confined in Prospero’s dream of a play, including the audience. Yet all participants more or less submit to the island theatrical: the mood is therefore stoic, not tragic. “Space enough have I in such a prison,” says Ferdinand, who is the antithesis of the disenchanted, acid-eyed Hamlet (I.ii.599). The masterof-revels Prospero is delighted to hear that Ferdinand goes along with the fantasia: “It works!” And work The Tempest does because the poetic powers are not in Hamlet-like excess of the dramatic framework. Ariel crafts the illusions ordered by Prospero and though he yearns to escape the fantasy, he is willing to wait until play’s end. No “liberty” “before the time be out,” says

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Prospero, and Ariel obligingly meets Prospero’s “all points of command to the syllable.” No carping about getting on with the plot and soldiering on to “the last syllable of recorded time” here. For this reason (and unlike Hamlet from the Ghost), Ariel consistently receives high employee ratings from his boss (“thou has done well, fine Ariel”). He is as happy to serve his play as Hamlet is unhappy to help his. Hence no tragedy mars The Tempest. Which is not to say that Shakespeare forgets that he is confined or that he is not the king of infinite space bound in a nutshell. Prospero speaks the last line of The Tempest directly to the audience to say “Let your indulgence set me free.” This would suggest that the time of the play has been one of imagination bound; that it has been a place where the freelance creator was indentured to the playwright-on-payroll. Exultantly, Prospero resigns his directorship, his “charms all o’erthrown,” anticipating Shakespeare by a few months when he too would walk away from the Globe to spend the theaterfree last years of his life in Stratford. Why the revels must end is simply that the illusionist is exhausted. “Vex’d” Prospero says that “what strength I have . . . [is] most faint”; he begs his audience not “to be disturb’d with my infirmity” and “to bear with my weakness.” Under the tiredness, there peeps the Hamletian disgust with the stuff of fiction itself: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (V.i.165–73) This is not gently bowing out of the Globe; it is more like slamming the door to knock the timbered frame down to the last “rack”—the rack which has been Shakespeare’s creative bane (and bliss) of twenty years. Finally turning to the audience, Prospero beseeches them to release him from the stage, “this bare island” of fiction, so he may go and fade out of mind, somewhere beyond the horizon. Dismissing actors, walking dreams, half-puppets, figments, fairies, and fancies, here is the artist grown modern in full vocal dissatisfaction with the modalities of artistic expression (the “faults” and “crimes” in the play for which Prospero the stage master begs the public’s forgiveness). Out of this dissatisfaction with fiction is born a new kind of expression: an art of discontent-with-art, an art of self-complication and self-doubt and self-dismissal, an art that bizarrely tries to break out of its own fictive existence, an art so besotted with freedom that it even wishes to be free from art—in sum, a modern art.

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Sorry business and other apologies Come Act V, Hamlet the modern artist is resigned to fall into line with the plot. Shamed by models of filial valor (“how all occasions do inform against me”), he vows revenge (IV.iv.32–33): “From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (IV.iv.66). But no bloody deed really follows, which means that his thoughts must be nothing worth. And since Hamlet does nothing if not obliquely and self-consciously, this worthlessness is stuff for parody. Since he cannot be great, Hamlet will be dismal, and since he cannot be free, he will be abjectly unfree. Act V is a festival of indignity: Hamlet clowns around with a jester-gravedigger; he truckles with pirates; he disgraces himself at Ophelia’s funeral (“I’ve had nothing to do with her death,” he says, “and besides no one has ever loved her the way I did!”); he grapples in an open grave; he banters with an insignificant retainer; he agrees to a court-masque fencing game for the amusement of the king. All thoughts of revenge have deserted him. He is by any description a courtier—a professional wag, and it is a clown (a scrambling, accidental, outwitted, illcoordinated clown) who kills Claudius, not a valorous prince with a steely aim. He who could not lift a finger to advance the plot now patters headlong with it, as good a team player/fencer as ever can be. He becomes everything he despises; or rather he comes to terms with what he has been all along: a puppet. And once the anti-plot tension that sustained the drama eases, the play whimpers out, delivers an offhand climax, and wraps up. Some critics have called it transcendent resignation, even angelic detachment.20 Hamlet—this is his last impersonation—wraps it all in the toga of stoic philosophy: “There’s a divinity that shapes our end,” “the readiness is all,” “even in that was heaven ordinant,” “let be,” “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” As for the intrigue, it seems Shakespeare washes his hands of it. Figures hurry in and out, and the revenge arc, which took four acts and a half not to happen, is dispatched with a mechanical thud. Once Hamlet stops resisting the plot, the play ends; it ends because it gets on track and because the prince’s resistance to it was its real interest. The plot must prevail, and Hamlet must serve his inheritance as Shakespeare must serve his inherited story, but the mood of hurried dispatch and impatience is unmistakable. *

*

*

Only at the eleventh hour, when he recovers from his own estrangement, does Shakespeare pull himself up. Having led his underachieving prince to the edge of irrelevance, he compensates with a bombastic send-off. Methinks he protests too much: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (V.ii.342–43). But the baroque apotheosis scarcely conceals the rot. Hamlet, who remains the

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conscience of the play, knows he is not “noble” or “sweet.” He fears for his posterity. “What a wounded name” I leave behind, he sighs in his last breath (V.ii.328). He appoints Horatio as hagiographer designate: “Horatio, I am dead; thou livest; report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied” (V.ii.322–23). The unsatisfied? It seems as though Shakespeare suspects his anti-play may prove disappointing. Hamlet’s operatic death scene is damage control. First, apologies. He begs Horatio to live “awhile” so as “to tell my story” (V.ii.330–33), as though his story is not what we have sat some four hours watching. “Report me and my cause aright”: this admits that the performance has not done that and leaves him in hero’s purgatory. Then excuses: if I have not been the prince I should have been, it is not for cowardice but greatness: there is so much in me, such heights and depths of apprehension, which simply could not fit in this here earthly frame: “Things standing thus unknown shall I leave behind me!” (V.ii.328). “O, I could tell you” (V.ii.320). The things I could tell you if this play had let me. Does Hamlet suspect he has not lived up to his top billing? Fortinbras, who gets the last word, joins in the apologetics. Over Hamlet’s remains, he says, “he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royal” (V.ii.442–43). Hamlet was never given the chance; Shakespeare had to work with what he was given. The result is, the playwright fears, less than royal—perhaps a dud, a drama so crooked and contrary that no one will stand for its four hours of irresolution topped by a ten-minute frenzy. It is so much ado about nil. Hamlet has nothing to communicate in the end, no social order to bestow. He has absorbed the play into himself and yields back a mangled thing. For a good reason does Shakespeare put Fortinbras, an anti-Hamlet, in charge. And then he bows out, and perhaps braces for the boos and caterwauls. But the booing and caterwauling never came, and rather the contrary. Equal to the mystery of Hamlet’s procrastination is the mystery of the play’s success: that a piece of drama made of “mischance on plots and errors” (V.ii.398–99), of “purposes mistook” (389), of “accidental judgments [and] casual slaughters” (387), where much that is promised never happens, and much happening is accidental—that this play should be the most admired (though not beloved) in the Shakespearean canon, if not on the Western stage. That indeed is a mystery—the mystery being our modern lot.

The Hamlet mystery Why have we raised to the pinnacle a play that is such a magnificent drag? The brief answer is because, as Harold Bloom says, Hamlet invents us or, to speak more circumspectly, because the play invents modern art, because it sketches out a realm of artistic expression that still contains us. In the

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terminology used hereafter, the play’s relevance has to do with its inventing the legends of modern art by which we feel and perceive the human world. Foremost among these legends is freedom. Personal freedom operates both inside its fictional universe and in the making of it. Inside, we could say that Hamlet’s procrastination is an as-yet timid way of defending the individual right to be undefined. He rejects the cardboard “seems” of identity that is presented to him. If revenge he has to wreak, he wishes to do it, not because he must, but because he sincerely wills it. He wants to be authentic—to his own self be true. Here begins the modern mystique of selfhood. The prince is to himself a terra incognita—supposedly too deep for words, supposedly too immense for a mere stage to frame. No wonder the Romantics fell in love with him: he is the modern individual who would be no one: no one to whom we can attach the label of a part. This search for inner truth sets him at loggerheads with the court, his mother, his father, his beloved, society, and the Globe at large. He should have just played the part; instead he sincerely wants to be the part, and this passion for sincerity and presence and actuality leads him to fail the revenge play. Hamlet cannot harmonize his being-for-himself with his being-for-others. “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body,” he wordplays (III.ii.26–27), touching on the modern distinction between person and social function. It is no easy condition, this split consciousness. Hamlet takes on the trusteeship of history but cannot shoulder its burden; he will be true to himself but cannot altogether subtract himself from social compromise. His independence is fretted with guilt; he is a melancholy individualist who perhaps understands that freedom is but another persona, a readymade “seems,” a “fardel” to bear. Freedom is a drag—literally, it brings a prince and his plot down. And it also brings Shakespeare down, in a manner of speaking—for what magnificence, what unparalleled intelligence and beauty well up from this frustration! Shakespeare belongs in that generation of artists who are not yet artists (they are still contracted artisans whose job, as Prospero says, is exclusively “to please”), yet have begun to develop a spiritual and professional sense as creators and poets (see the next chapter). Hamlet expresses one creator’s frustration with the conventions of stage plot and characterization. With Shakespeare, this frustration spreads to the very essence of fiction: Hamlet is art dissatisfied with the confining unreality, the vanity, the flimsiness of art. It is art about art, yes, though this doesn’t say enough (artistic self-consciousness not being a strictly modern phenomenon, even if it becomes endemic in the early modern period 1550–1700 and downright epidemic after 1780). Hamlet is art seeking an escape, a transcendence from art; it is an artist bound up and limited by art, and thus in dispute with the confines of his own creative self. We might assume that such a dispute should be a drain on creative expression; but the reverse holds true. Both the prince and his creator soar

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for maladjustment: the former with his role, the latter with the form and substance of art. Hamlet chafes at the yoke of his role, his freedom is taken away from him, and therefore his genius explodes in every direction. He thrives on what cripples him. And so does Shakespeare. The play’s overflowing genius and exuberant brilliance stem from adversity, from a creator who is displeased with the substance of art. We heed Hazlitt’s keen observation that Shakespeare is never more creative than when he isn’t allowed to speak as himself: “It was only by representing others, that he became himself. [. . .] In his own person, he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic.”21 Give Will license to speak, and he stagnates; put him somewhere out of his element and he touches the sky. When he gave his verve a free flow, (say) in his sonnets, Shakespeare was brilliant but not wonderful. It took his being held back, curbed, displeased, dissatisfied with the whole comedy of art for him to take art to a whole new level of genius. He blossomed where he was stifled, the same way Hamlet reinvents the language of fiction out of its being nowhere at home in fiction. Had the prince and the Bard been up to the job, there would be no Hamlet. For Hamlet is the curbing of the poetic will which produces wonders. Its beauty is of a poem that is not allowed to be one and by not being one that impedes the play from being the average play it ought to be. Out of the double impediment (a play that is less than a play, a poem that cannot be one) Shakespeare engendered modern art: an art-against-itself kind of art.

In summary The birthplace of modern art is not just a cradle; it is also a suicide alley. In Hamlet, we do not have a Shakespeare who is desperate to innovate (that is one legend of modernity, the legend of novelty, which he keeps off his plate); rather, we have an artist who yearns to be done with art. And in this artweariness, this formal disquietude, this sense of inhabiting a language game that is out of step with one’s intention, this knowledge of one’s fallibility and the incapacity to transcend it; in this gap between aspiration and achievement, Hamlet sends modern art on its way, the legends out of which future artists would forge works of art and poetry.

2 Michelangelo, or the Labors of Freedom

We began this study with Shakespeare because he is a milestone. Milestones point forward and backward. When we look backward from Hamlet, we see that it gathers streams of artistic self-doubt and complication that run throughout the period of the High Renaissance known as “mannerist.” One such stream takes us back to a great predecessor in the arts of artistic disenchantment, Michelangelo. “Il Terribile” (the awesome, the magnificent, the titanic) Michelangelo lived long enough (1475–1564), a year and a month short of his ninetieth winter, to watch himself become a legend. He was courted by all the principalities of Italy and by the French and Spanish courts. Hagiographies, compilations of his sayings, reverent vitae, copies of his masterworks spread his fame as far afield as Flanders, even to the Americas. Annoyingly (at least to the great man), collectors rummaged his old haunts to ferret out any sketch, scrap, or bozetto bearing his imprint. When he died, the catafalque was borne in procession through the streets of Rome up to the Church of the Holy Apostles. Weeks later when his fellow Florentines opened the coffin, they found no noisome corpse but a body “perfect in every part,” “at rest in a sweet and most peaceful sleep.”1 A miracle indeed to crown a man of most miraculous aptitude. For truly, his sanctifier-in-chief Giorgio Vasari enthused, “his coming was to the world . . . an exemplar sent by God to the men of our arts, to the end that they might learn from his life the nature of noble character, and from his works what true and excellent craftsman ought to be.”2 A light unto the nations, a messiah unto art. And not to fall behind, his funeral eulogy proclaimed that none had lived a godlier life, and none had died a more Christian death than Buonarroti, henceforth known to all concerned as Michelangelo il divino.3 As legends go, it has worn well—this effigy of Michelangelo as the artist par excellence, as art incarnate. It is the myth through which the crowds at the Sistine Chapel look up and behold genius unbound, creativity writ large,

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the human spirit at its most Promethean: man picturing God begetting man, and thus encompassing his own origin, and thus also our original story, the legend of modernity according to which we ourselves are the measure and the law and the maker of reality. Divino indeed. Of course this myth didn’t spring out of thin air; it had been gestating inside Renaissance humanism which, born of the coupling of Christian theology and ancient philosophy, enshrined human beings at the center of the cosmic and moral order. It was the notion that we have a say, not just in how we conduct our lives but in what we make of the world. “Man is the measure,” said the humanists quoting the ancient sophist Protagoras, and this meant that man was a legislator and a creator. The principle of art, of poesis, of making was inherent in us. “A creature cannot create,” said Augustine:4 this humbling curb, cemented deep in medieval existence, is just what humanism would no longer countenance and proceeded to dismantle, one tract, one treatise, one work of art at a time. We can create indeed, said the humanist, and moreover do so originally, throwing off the authority of precedent, and fashion things the way we want. Obviously this creative power, this free will of creation, gave the artist a starring role. If human life indeed was creativity, then it stood to reason that the artist might be primus inter pares of human types. Such a hero—man as a creating titan, a winged demiurge—is the character who to this day pulls the crowds into the Sistine Chapel the attraction of which, for the great many, is not religious or cosmic or theological but aesthetic. It is, not the pope’s chapel, but Michelangelo’s. Thither, to human creativity’s own shrine, we now turn to see how the divine artist fashioned a properly modern art, not by flying on the legends of freedom and creativity, but getting gloriously tangled in them. Michelangelo of course isn’t our only Renaissance creator-gods: Leonardo is a strong runner-up, Raphael is not far behind, and Shakespeare is a category all his own. Yet, Michelangelo is a special case because not only he, his art too lived by the humanist conviction that man has invenzione, the godlike power of creating ex nihilo, and that he, as an artist (to quote Vasari), “never consents to be bound by any law, whether ancient or modern . . . [and] has a brain always able to discover new things.”5 Artisans follow measures and models; an artista conjures. This conviction throbs through Michelangelo’s work from 1500 onward; it is, I propose to show, the theme of his so long life and career. A certain elective pride, excited from rubbing shoulders with grandees, always spurred him to distinguish himself from craftsmen, copyists, or other artistic jobbers who could not hold the candle to the artist—creative, free, effortless, instinctive, and godlike in judgment: “I will tell you, to do anything quickly and swiftly is very profitable and good. It is a gift received from the immortal God to do in a few hours what another is painting over many days.”6 Art is inborn, like blue blood, and just as loath to manual work (“One who tries hardest fails” and “one paints

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with the brain and not the hand”).7 These sayings speckle the length of Michelangelo’s poems and correspondence and show that he subscribes to the humanist vision of man as nature-born creator and of art as intellectual vision rare and miraculous and unobtainable by mere training. This myth is, I believe, the force that scowls and muscles its way through Michelangelo’s masterpieces and sets the peculiarly modern tone of art—an art that is extraordinarily concerned with autonomy, authenticity, originality, and purity; an art that worries whether it is ever sufficiently true to its demiurgic mandate; an art that agonizes over its begetting, birth, and “conditions of possibility.” All these traits, which furnish the legends of modern art, are already there in Michelangelo thematically and formally, at nearly every milestone of his career.

The vexation of freedom Michelangelo found, and did not invent, the legend of artistic freedom. It had been aborning through the Quattrocento, timidly at first and not without regard for the challenge it posed to the prestige of patronage, guild, and tradition.8 In the early 1400s, a painter like Cennino Cennini could be heard advising his cohorts to “put yourselves under the guidance of a master as early as possible, and to leave the master as late as possible.”9 A bare century later, this idea sounded odd and a tad plebeian. Typical of his generation of artistas, Leonardo would say that “a painter will produce pictures of little worth if he takes for his standard the pictures of others” and that “painters should never imitate the works of others.”10 By 1550, this is all more or less an official truth. As Michelangelo said (and as Vasari echoed in many forms), “I dare affirm that any artist . . . who has nothing singular, eccentric, or at least reputed to be so, in his person, will never become a superior talent.”11 Mark the “at least reputed to be so”: it seems already then an artist could only profit from a reputation of originality, and that a kind of rebelliousness toward convention had become a selling point. This philosophy suffuses his sayings. “Those who work in the arts must learn to do their own work,” Vasari heard the master say.12 To Francisco de Holanda, he declared that “poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare do whatever they approve of.”13 The artist’s will and willfulness are sole authority in all matters of creation—not taste, not convention, and not the patron (to whom—and it was a pope no less—Michelangelo once brusquely said that his fresco would be ready when it is to his, Michelangelo’s, liking and no one else’s). Indeed if we must find a time when the legend of artistic freedom truly transformed minds and works of art, then high Renaissance Italy is it, and Michelangelo especially. But what sets Michelangelo apart for our purpose is that if he gloried in the artista’s new-carved freedom, he also inherited its worries. The worries

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of freedom start from definition and practicality: What does it mean “to do one’s own work”? How can one be one’s own teacher? To be auto-nomous is to be self-ruled. But isn’t self-rule (unlike self-government) a contradiction in terms? Where the ruled is identical to the ruler, the former can always flout the rules. Thus, autonomy strictly conceived is a-nomy, any rule and no rule. It amounts to saying that artistic achievement is up to one’s will. But what does one want? How does one know what one wants and that it is the right thing to want? How does one know how or when it has been attained? In truth, autonomy brings perplexity. How, furthermore, is the autonomous (“eccentric,” “singular”) artist ever sure of hitting the mark? A craftsman knows the standards he either fulfills or fails on any given job, whereas the self-ruled artist is constitutively uncertain. No externally dictated right and wrong tells him why and how he has failed or succeeded. Perhaps his masterpiece is a success, perhaps it is a dud: but if he is his own judge, then ultimately he can never know. Even in success there lurks henceforth the shadow of failure. Am I any good? On this question, the craftsman can be categorically answered. Never quite so firmly the artista. He has freed himself from externals but thereby inherits a doubt that can sour his deepest satisfaction. I draw this quick portrait of the disquiet of modern artistic freedom because it is my argument that it molds important aspects of Michelangelo’s oeuvre. With Michelangelo the full-blown legend of Creation Unbound gets underway, and with him too, and for the same reason, begins the dirge of the unhappy creator who moans about the “vexations, annoyances and travails” of art.14

Trials and travails And how Michelangelo could moan! A brooding man even on his best days, the master could boast one moment then mull his failings the next, and at length. His uncertainty, his fatigue, his guilt over the damnable error of giving everything to art: Michelangelo’s letters and poems are a dirge of artistic vexation. Apparently being l’artista divino wasn’t all heavenly rulership: In such great slavery, such weariness, And with false concepts and a soul in danger, To be where I am, carving things divine.15 Though it grows louder in old age, this lamentation beclouds even his heyday. It was the return swing of the pendulum of self-conviction. The more boldly he “dared” and “did his own work,” the more original and anomic his work grew and the more chartless and doubting and groping he felt. Even his

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boasts lacked the clear ring of confidence. Often he issued them to throw the gauntlet and put down rivals (Bramante, Raphael, Leonardo). In private, he dilated endlessly on the miseries and vanities of art. “Painting and sculpture, fatigue and faith have ruined me, and things are still going from bad to worse. It would have been better if in my youth I had hired myself out to make sulphur matches.”16 It is, to be sure, self-pity and a roundabout way to fish for sycophantic assurance. Still, the moan of failed enterprise is so frequent that it must have been of the things Michelangelo believed about himself. Does anyone ever do anything worthwhile? Do my sculptures really transcend the stone out of which they are made? Are those toys of mine triumphs of self-mastery? Making those big dolls, I wonder what the point was. . . . The art for which in bygone days I won golden opinions brings me here at last, poor, old, and servant to another’s will.17 Not only does he understand that making art hasn’t set him free but it has also confined him in a prison house of his own art-making, bound up in doubt. I’m locked up here like pulp in a rind or like a genie trapped inside a bottle; I live like this, poor, lonely, and confined.18 This sense of confinement is a noted quality of Michelangelo’s designs. They seldom unfurl and soar, these forms. Their kinetic energy seems to fold inward, pent up, gripped by what sculptor Auguste Rodin called a reploiement douloureux de l’être sur lui-même (a plaintive curling-in on one’s self).19 Artistic expression is by definition outward-bound, but Michelangelo seldom liberates his forms; he casts and reigns them in at the same time, signifying the inbound tug that keeps a form “like a genie trapped in a bottle.” Thus his David; thus his Moses; thus the hulking nudes of his Sistine ceiling, collosi who seem to muscle out of their own corporeal straightjacket. As it was for Hamlet, so it is for Michelangelo: the stage of expression is too small—too small or rather made to look too small, like his vestibule of the Laurentian Library which he designed to be overwhelmed by swelling, writhing, tumbling staircase that would be king of infinite space were it not bound in a nutshell. This is a scene of creative eccentricity alright—no interior architectural space seems quite so pointedly awry, so oppressively proportioned. But it is eccentricity (Michelangelo’s term) and expressive freedom hungry for restraint. “To do one’s work” is exhilarating, to be sure; but strictly speaking it lands the artist in a vacuum. Where to start when everything is possible? Where to

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go? Freedom needs walls: a receptacle, something to bounce off of, an arena of activity. With Michelangelo, the impulse of freedom (still historically so novel, so unproven, so weighty) spawned a matching need for confinement. Paradoxically, then, Michelangelo needed to feel stymied if he was to lunge into the work. This obstruction Michelangelo sought everywhere he could—outside the workshop, where Florence and Rome supplied competitors, defamers, plotters, enemies aplenty. If artists like Raphael and Leonardo charmed their way through the market of Renaissance art, Michelangelo sank in its paranoia. For him, every admirer concealed a spy, and every hired assistant was a saboteur in disguise. He, the artista who could not stand his own freedom, saw enemies and troubles behind every commission. There was always a bullying pope or a meddling, unappreciative duke to hinder him, and his correspondence is a gestae heroicae of persecution—disputes with fellow artists, with his relatives, with suppliers, with apprentices, with patrons. And when outside adversity ran low, Michelangelo dug for it inside himself. Then even his self-belief, his boldness, his expressive assertion were traps lying in wait. “The more one believes in oneself the more one is deceived,” he sighed.20 Self-doubt, the doubt that one’s art is on the right track, that it is right and strong, is therefore the truth—or any rate the truth which Michelangelo kept before his eyes. And later as he faced death, his eight decades of making art seemed to him a long miscarriage. On his deathbed, he told his confessor, “I regret that I am dying just as I am beginning to learn the alphabet of my profession.”21 Of course, this in context is the last breath of a ninety-year-old penitent; but the spirit is true to the tone of Michelangelo’s self-assessment over the better part of his life. It agrees with the trail of abandoned projects and aborted designs that bestrew his career.22 And it accords with his exclaiming, while yet in his prime, “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”23 Lord, grant that I may always do second best; Lord, grant that a breakthrough may ever be denied to me. This isn’t lust for resounding success but for adversity; it isn’t a wish for expression to soar and break free but to curl and twist and complicate its own begetting. Lasciatemi stare nei miei panni ravvolto (just leave me here all alone wrapped up within myself), Michelangelo wrote on a drawing.24 This is the pose in which we may picture the creator and his creation; it is a picture of the Michelangesque midwifery of art, which takes on its peculiarly modern dynamic—where the artista mulls the conditions of impossibility of art. The moment this impossibility bedevils Michelangelo is also the time when he creates strong and original works—works that evince the peculiar perversity of purpose that invents modern art. To understand this dynamic, let us first follow the progress of Michelangelo’s life about which we have, thanks to his fame even then, a very full picture.

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The unhappy drunk and the reluctant parent At twenty-one, Michelangelo is an up-and-coming sculptor who, it is said, can turn out a perfect imitation of the antique manner. In 1496 he moves to Rome in search of ecclesiastical commissions, the first of which comes from a cardinal di San Giorgio who orders a Bacchus. It isn’t long before this patron declares himself displeased by the young Florentine’s sculpture. It isn’t of a god in drunken glow but a languid, bleary, ambivalent youth featuring gladiatorial arms at the top, a high-waisted feminine thorax in the middle, a long and creamy abdomen, and lecherous legs below. Half centurion and half bibulous angel, that Bacchus is a wobbly blur between the classical and the gothic. Its contrapposto has none of the winsome gallantry that Donatello or Bertoldo di Giovanni could impart; it is more of a flinch, a misstep—ambivalence set in stone, which, if it is served by remarkably precocious mastery, seems to give Michelangelo unrest rather than satisfaction. It is the portrait of a young man who knows not where he stands, artistically speaking, nor quite what he wants. Michelangelo’s next important work is on surer footing, publicity-wise. In fact, it crowns him as the artist to fight over. With the Pietà (1499) Michelangelo creates what is perhaps his most fit-for-purpose masterpiece: there, artistry is fully in the service of the religious emotion and blends the precise anatomical realism of Greco-Roman statuary with the featherlight contouring of gothic idealism. To be sure, there are odd touches here and here. So idealized is his Mary that she seems a maiden barely out of her teens, which makes her younger than her thirty-three-year-old son. Michelangelo shrugged off the complaint. Virgins look young no matter their age, he said. Virginal aging aside, we may want to think of her youth as a matter less biological than artistic, and that it bears on the affinity between a young mother who offers up her son to a sacrifice and a young artist who surrenders the child of his creative loins. This affinity perhaps prompts the young sculptor to splash his signature in big Roman letters across the bosom of that young mother, as though it (the signature) was also her name: MICHAELA[N]GELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTIN[US] FACIEBA(T) (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, was making this). No need to enlarge on the immodest sacrilege of renting the mother of God as advertising space. Michelangelo’s friend and biographer Ascanio Condivi explains it all as a matter of just attribution. After he heard admirers praising his Pietà on another sculptor, Michelangelo crept into the crypt with chisel in hand, put to rest any doubt as to who the creator was. Though it may be legend, the anecdote gets the gist of Michelangelo’s creative drama—the sense that he was too bound up in his offspring, too identified with the begetting of it, to let go. By signing with the imperfect tense “faciebat” (was making) rather than the more correct preterit “fecit” (made), Michelangelo honored the tradition of ancient sculptors like Appelles and Polyclitus who,

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by signing in the imperfect tense, admitted the imperfection of human work, at least until the patron gives his nod).25 But faciebat also highlights the retention complex of Michelangelo’s art, of the fact that creative gestation and birth are internal to it. The work, so far as he saw it, was never about the finished product but about its being made. Art-making (faciebat) occupied Michelangelo’s work; it was the thing that enfolded him and which he, like a mother, enwombed. Part of him could not let go; part of him was held up by it, and art-making amounted to this emotion of being wrapped up (ravvolto) in an incomplete task. The Virgin yields her offspring with a sweet suffering infinity of feeling. As for Michelangelo himself, this would be the last time he would signify such sublime surrender. Thereafter the jealous impulse to retain rules his artistry.

Fighters The next major commission sees Michelangelo back in his native Florence. There he is to carve a colossal statue of David to lionize this proud city’s independence. His brief has everything to whet his growing appetite for difficulty. He is to sculpt the giant youth (Il Gigante, “The Giant,” is how it was known among Florentines) out of a narrow eighteen-foot column of partly carved Carrara marble. It is a very public commission, but Michelangelo makes it very much his own right from the start and erects a stockade around the worksite to shut out prying eyes and admiring meddlers. For the three years he carves and buffs the marble, it is to be the artista alone with his statue, small Michelangelo against the Goliath of making art. Today we struggle to behold “The Giant” as it sprang from Michelangelo’s hands in 1504—so worn is it by the banality of gimcrack reproductions, so veneered in cultish praise and art-historical cant. It/he has come to stand for Renaissance man, “bold,” “confident,” “certain of his destiny,” “comfortable in his own skin,” a paragon of “grace under pressure.”26 This is David we know as captain of premier league football embodied in a form “perfectly proportioned.”27 This, as praise goes, is rather purblind, since the statue is neither perfectly proportioned nor especially confident. Sure of his destiny this David isn’t because Michelangelo depicts him before the fight and not (unlike Donatello and Verrochio, for example) with a foot on his beheaded trophy.28 As he stands, he is yet to face Goliath, and forever not yet victorious—his sinews taut with expectation, his veins gnarled and swollen, his abdomen sucked against the crenellated ribcage, a scowl furrowing his brow. His fighting strength, if it was ever noble, rolls into nervous, disproportionately large hands that would not be out of place working at a butcher’s stall. Were his right fist not clenched, it would, ape-like, graze his knee. Fear turns man into a beast, and so it does to this David who is set for

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carnage. He will emerge, not haloed in Grecian heroism but breathless with a frenzy that totally consumes him. Hence, perhaps, his worry, his disgust: it is of someone who watches bloodlust and fear and fury engulf his soul. Davide colla fromba,/e io coll’ arco/Michelangelo (David with his sling, I with the bow): Michelangelo scratched out this enigmatic couplet on a drawing study of his Giant. The bow (arco) probably alludes to the bow-shaped drill used by Renaissance sculptors. As David must conquer the oversize Goliath, so must Michelangelo bind and beat and master the towering block of marble into form. It is no foregone victory—not for the artist who works alone, “beyond the rules,” and outside the safety ring of tradition. Like David, the emancipated artist stakes all his worth, indeed his entire creative being, in the unpredictable event. And the giant-killer, whose every groove and bump throbs with danger, is a picture, not of “grace under pressure” but of freedom in the balance, both fierce and unsure. Hence the vacillation between lunging and slumping, between aggression and collapse, which courses through him and typifies so many of Michelangelo’s figures henceforth—figures that know not whether the enemy is outside or inside and whether the struggle consists of mastering the world or mastering oneself. By training and conviction, Michelangelo always advocated disegno, the strong containing line, the enfolding vision. In practice, however, there lurks in his forms the awful doubt that design may not tame chaos and that reason and controlled vision will not have the last word. This uncertainty is the lot of the artista who has nothing but himself (his lone genius, his personal vision) to guide him. No past victory guarantees the next one; the struggle starts anew with every project, and every gesture sends the artist back to apprehensive apprenticeship. Can I? Will I? How, wherefore and why? In this expectancy the Michelangelesque form forges its odd blend of muscular clout and nervy depression. Though he may not have known it, let alone understood that it was the wages of modernity, Michelangelo ran on this uncertainty. It always seemed to find him. As it happens, his next commission delivered that ingredient in plenty—offering the mix of frustration, paranoia, neurotic martyrdom, doubt, discouragement, and self-assertion in the teeth of defeat that was the fuel and the medium of his art.

An unwanted job Now in 1505, and an art celebrity on the make, Michelangelo is called to Rome. The fearsome Pope Julius II wants him to sculpt a tomb of Pharaonic proportion, a three-tiered extravaganza bristling with some forty statues. The project is reckoned to take up the better part of a decade; it should seal his immortal fame. For six months, Michelangelo draws the plan and

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spends another six months picking the marble in Carrara. Then Pope Julius equivocates, withholds payment, appears to change his mind. There comes a series of dangerous misunderstandings between mighty pope and irascible artista. Finally, against his will and judgment, Michelangelo is handed a different assignment: Julius II wants, not a tomb after all, but a painted ceiling. Michelangelo despairs, smells a trap: “enemies” have talked the pontiff into forcing the Florentine to a job that is bound to result in failure. For, Michelangelo protests, he is no painter. No è mia arte! No è mia professione! Nè io pittore: I am not a painter, he moans to all and sundry; painting is really not his trade, and al fresco painting, especially on a ceiling, even less. He has in fact next to no training in this difficult technique. Clearly the plan is hatched by “the envy of Bramante and Raphael” who, says he, wish “to destroy me.”29 In vain he pleads; the pope is not to be argued with: Michelangelo will paint a ceiling fresco. To mark his contrary mood then and over the four years of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–12), Michelangelo will sign his letters “Michelangelo, Sculptor in Rome”—as if to tell everyone and above all himself that he is out of his element, at odds with craft, a stranger in the house of art (that estrangement between the maker and the made being a tenet of what would become modern art). When after the first few weeks the paint on a central panel begins to blister and flake, he sees this as vindicating proof of his ineptitude. “I have told your Holiness that this is not my art! What I have done is spoilt,” he tells the pope.30 Julius II is undeterred and sends for a seasoned frescoer who names the problem (overly wet intonaco). In no time is Michelangelo back on the job, in a swarm of doubt, the fiasco of the Papal tomb heavy on his shoulder, advancing day by day into a failure foretold. His protestations of incompetence aren’t just a matter of damage control; it is a story he needs to tell himself. He confides it to friends: “My painting is dead. . . . I am not in the right place for I am not a painter.” One year into the job, he tells his father, “I am in a great dither. . . . My work does not seem to go ahead in a way to merit anything. This is due to the difficulty of the work and also because it is not my profession. In consequence, I lose my time fruitlessly.”31 A few months later, he strikes the same note: “I am living here in a state of great anxiety and of the greatest physical fatigue.”32 Fatigue must be expected in such a vast undertaking, but the anxiety doesn’t let up even when in the last stretch it is plain that Michelangelo is onto something magnificent. To the end, he flails, he despairs, he prevaricates to himself: “My mind is so far out of joint that it gets nothing right; show me the crooked/barrel that shoots straight.”33 Week after week, the mood of his work is thus the very inverse of that imagined by Vasari when he says that Michelangelo “stripped away the veil of difficulty from all that can be done in painting.”34 As far as the artist was concerned, it remained a blind man’s job tangled up in a thicket all the way: a four-year stumble into the unknown.

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Terms and conditions Nè io pittore: that, of course, was a glorious fib. Michelangelo had painted in the past, and beautifully so. A tondo (picture in the round) of the Holy Family of 1504 told papal informers everything they needed to know about having the right man for the job. Of course, what matters is not what they thought but what Michelangelo felt. And he, for one, never altogether liked painting or felt comfortable in it. Even as late as the time of the two Capella Paolina frescoes thirty years later and with his success in the Sistine Chapel now legendary, he would still carp and moan about painting (“I can deny nothing to Pope Paul, and I shall paint miserably and make miserable things”).35 The point, then, is to see what it is about painting that so vexed Michelangelo and for the selfsame reason drew wonders out of him. Painting, unlike sculpture, is an open-ended process—not only the most appropriate of medium for an emancipated artist but also the most perplexing. To explain: the sensitive difference between sculpture and painting for Michelangelo was that between subtraction and addition. “By sculpture I mean that which is fashioned by the effort of cutting away, while painting is fashioned by the method of building up.”36 In the former, one creates by taking down; in the latter by giving away. To sculpt is to fight in an environment of want and growing scarcity (there is only so much one can cut away before ending up with nothing); to paint, by contrast, is liberal and optimistic, and, in economic terms, an environment of boundless plenty. It is, for this reason, quite foreign to Michelangelo’s creative character. Stone offers a tangible force field and a downward limit beyond which creation cannot go; painting gives freedom no such definite arena. A painter can always add more, wipe out, pile the stuff on again, and revise and refine and start anew. His outlook is virtually infinite; it is a haze of possibilities that lead to further possibilities, and never, as it were, solid ground. There, artistic freedom stares at its own anxious indeterminate face. This is where we find Michelangelo staring at his blank ceiling. It is the dream of freedom because he can call forth anything he imagines; but, just on this account, it is a nightmare of boundless potential action. Absent the foothold of a familiar medium, Michelangelo founders in his oversupplied freedom, and the flailing, if we look for it, is everywhere in the painted epic of the Sistine ceiling. It is its core theme—the problem of what to do when one can do anything, when there is nothing, no earth, no sky, nor time nor space nor light and dark, to stay one’s hand. For a reason did Michelangelo choose the myth of Creation—the story of how everything was made out of nothing—for his troublesome fresco. How does one act when absolutely anything can be made—when there is nothing but the will that there should be something? What does absolute creative freedom feel like?

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To answer the question is first of all to put it in context. Vasari maintains that Michelangelo was given a free hand to do as he pleased on the Vatican ceiling. This makes for good copy and gives a sense of the social prestige enjoyed by artists in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, but it is unrealistic of the authority of papal theologians with whom Michelangelo was in consultation. If he was able to nix the original plan (painting the twelve apostles in hieratic postures), equally it is sure that Michelangelo needed prior approval for his vast epic on the book of Genesis. Yet Vasari approximates the truth in that the theme of creatio ex nihilo struck a deep chord with Michelangelo who created as though he was completely free, and no doubt, once the work was begun, he was indeed in unchartered land. “Leave it all to me,” Michelangelo would warn his patrons; “trust me entirely in everything.”37 And thus the artist stood, for better and for worse, for glory and for pain, with only the boundless sky of his imagination for a canvas. This is where we find Michelangelo looking up at his blank ceiling, infinite in possibilities, and starting to paint what enthralled and worried him the most: what creative freedom feels like. What it feels like is not serene or magisterial; in fact, freedom does not feel free at all. It is cognitive fog; it means not knowing the outcome of the creative venture. Freedom perplexes itself. This perplexity—the trials and travails of being modern—gallops over the length and breadth of Michelangelo’s fresco of Creation Unbound.

A divine aberration As composition goes, the fresco is a wonder of disegno. Michelangelo divided the vault into architectonic sections, with one pictorial theme assigned to each: the Genesis stories in the nine central panels, Prophets and Sibyls in the twelve pendentives, the ancestors of Christ in the eight window spandrels and lunettes, and Pentateuch stories in the four corner pendentives. This doesn’t mean that, relative to the prevalent church style of frescoes, Michelangelo’s painting isn’t extravagant. Scripturally it is a hodgepodge: Genesis characters and scenes consort with seers of Hebraic and Greco-Roman mythology who were born to attend Yahweh’s “let there be light” yet there they are. Even more thematically incongruous are Christ’s ancestors and their families who squeeze into the small lunettes, a huddle of bumbling, undignified figures. The eye skips from the grandiose to the grotesque and from scriptures to the gymnasium: biblical events run cheek to jowl with athletes in the nude, grimacing cherubs and fauxmarble statuettes. How these figures add to liturgical solemnity is unclear; they certainly advertise the artist’s anatomical verve and an irrepressible momentum that quite incredibly did not find enough to feed on in biblical events.

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About this extraordinary menagerie it has been said that Michelangelo sought to disorient the viewer and “undermine any notion of coherent space.”38 This is a notion of subversive Michelangelo in (post-Modernist) control. In fact, undermining Euclidean space would have been his last concern. Let’s remember that he was learning on the job, that the glorious jumble is also the result of hit-and-miss. Guesswork is evident in the discrepancy between the earliest painted scenes (small-sized figures crowded into busy panels) which he forgot would be seen from sixty feet below, and the simplified and amplified figures that show up a third of the way in (oversized figures bursting out of simplified panels). By the end (on til the last syllable of its stage history the Eastern side), the oversizing is carried to excess. Where the early painted Prophets and Sibyls (Joel, Delphica, Erythraea, and Isaiah) fit primly on their cornices, the later ones (Daniel, Persica, and Jeremiah notably) tumble out of theirs. The altar-side figures are, on average, four feet taller than the ones on the entrance side. The same awkward contrast afflicts the central panels: the early ones (about man’s failed tenure of the world) look nervous and encumbered; the later ones offer the clear, sculptural trapeze leaps and lunges of a single demiurge character. The contrast serves the theme well enough (man: clumsy and mired in error; God: free, aerial, omnipotent), but it makes for a lean fore and a bulging aft. The iconography, moreover, isn’t consistent: in one panel, God is an aged patriarch who blesses Eve (and clumsily loses the top of his pate to the cropping upper frame); in the next, he is a long-robed comet, a missile of generative energy carried by overworked seraphs and one affrighted maiden. Who she is and what she is doing there is anyone’s guess, but by then (we are halfway across the ceiling) Michelangelo is unaccountable. He is swept into the expressive onrush; perhaps he is already under the spell of the legend of artistic creativity—a myth which in many ways starts with him and which transforms perplexity into a license to be eccentric. Other eccentricities: the early half of the ceiling is painted as if upon an upright wall, with the viewer situated perpendicular to the surface; at the halfway point, however, Michelangelo seems to have realized that the viewer is in fact below, di sotto in sù. Suddenly he wakens to the thrills of foreshortening—again, almost to excess, almost grotesquely (such as when sun-and-moon creating Yahweh thrusts his glorious hind parts to our amazed view). Tonal incongruities abound: on this side of a line, the grand cosmogenesis; on the other, menial house life (Christ’s ancestors, all ninetyone of them, cutting cloth, combing hair, spinning yarn, breastfeeding, bickering, brooding, breeding, and otherwise being ordinary). Art historians first agreed to politely ignore these shrieking disparities; then to justify them (e.g., the contrast between heaven and earth, between God and man, between beauty and ugliness, between classical and gothic, etc.); then to welcome them (the post-Modernist three cheers for confusion of any kind). Whatever the explanation, we can say that Michelangelo jettisons decorum. The first

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third comprises what we can call apologetic mistakes—bona fide errors of apprenticeship. Afterward, the uncertainty, the self-admitted errancy, is turned to advantage: it becomes a permit to err—to bravely blunder where no one has blundered before. Inconsistency and eccentricity are the stars and stripes of an artist who runs the gauntlet of freedom, takes ineptitude by the throat, and glories in not knowing just what in heaven and earth he is up to. This creative turbulence Michelangelo projects onto the God he invented: not the Byzantine God who legislates the world into existence; not the Neoplatonic God who plans it with a plumb line and quadrant; not the long-bearded magus who sparks the living flesh; but instead a genuinely creative God who works ex nihilo, with no foreplan and no geometrical law to bind him—God truly ante legem, prior to the law, unbounded will in action. Now, either free will makes mistakes or it isn’t free. For if it is inerrant, it is therefore obedient to a rule and therefore not free. The true demiurge knows no coherence and good taste. He can be Doctor Moreau if it so befalls. Around him may bloom a fauna of try-outs, grimacing grotesques, giant infants, hollow-eyed cherubs, hermaphrodites, crones and coquettes, stunted things, squirming bronzed freaks with elfish ears—the things of Michelangelo’s ceiling that have been deemed, not without wonder, “hideous in the full meaning of the word.”39 Yet such is free creative volition that it will spring errant mutations, bewildering things, a line of beauty which, modern in all but the name, never runs where it should. *

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The farther Michelangelo advanced into the work, the less he premeditated his scenes. Where sixty square feet of plaster would take long painstaking weeks in the early phase (1508–11), he covers the same area—the Separation of Earth and Sky—in one mind-boggling work day. In the end, he lashes the paint across the blank plaster without preliminary cartoons. His brushwork grows impulsive and flurried, as if scrambling to catch up with his inspiration. Here is born the modern artista: assertively devoid of knowhow and know-when. Not being a painter is now Michelangelo’s forte. He works savagely, lawlessly. He is the God of Augustine—the deity who, lest he be less than omnipotently free, obeys neither plan nor principle.40 Such a creator cannot know what he is going to do next. Michelangelo’s ceiling would not be the work of an artista without being autobiographical—without possessing the sense of personal discovery that pervades modern art. It isn’t fantastical to behold the painter in the portrait of the frenetic Creator-God of the second half of the ceiling. That figure is terrific and terrifying. The Creator has dropped the sacerdotal robes; he scuds, vaults, and free-falls across the sky—frantically busy, darting left and right from one job to the next, a Vulcan with too many irons in the fire. He fumbles, he gropes, he falls forward. Far from being a God who has the world at his

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beck, he is Jacob wrestling with a fog of guess work. His gesture of creating space, on the last panel, looks like sublime and furious surrender. Its steeply foreshortened figure replicates Michelangelo’s own working posture, neck thrown back, face strained upward, arms flailing overhead. It is the artist-god before blank space, creative freedom staring at its own openness. Here is the artista at work, off-balance, always on the brink. It is no use arguing that this fiat lux is a picture of triumph and creative sovereignty. What is it like to be an artist? the fresco asks: the answers is, it’s a pain.

Hard work Up until the end, indeed when the magisterial ceiling is near finished, Michelangelo complains. He is unable to rest on the good he has done; creation is always ahead, and vexation rules. It is July 1512, he has just completed the Separation of Earth and Sky, and still he thinks only of his pains. To his father, he writes, “I work harder than any man who has ever lived, and am in bad health and exhausted.”41 The last months are a rush to the finish line, a dash to get out of the work before it does him in: “I expect to finish by the end of September . . . if I don’t die in the meantime. I’m being as quick as I can, because I long to be home.”42 The rush is palpable in the brushwork of the final jornatas. But now his dissatisfaction with the painting al fresco grows vindictive, impetuous, and petulant. If a couple of years earlier he had artfully contoured the folds of God’s tunic, he now merely sketches them, while the neck, beard, nostrils, and eyelids of the overworked Lord resolve themselves into bulges and dabs. Everything breathes haste and impatience, a furious desire to wrestle off the yoke of a long work. The Sistine Chapel, let us remember, is the labor of a man who for four years stands with his arms above his head, his spine pressed backward, his cervical vertebrae in a knot. “Divine” he may have been, but divinity, so far as he felt it down to his brush, is hard work. It is perspiration, cramps, and scoliosis—not ecstasy. The ceiling shouts this discomfort with amplifying strength. In the first half, Michelangelo painted naked caryatid athletes, or ignuti, to buttress the central panel corners; in the second half, these ignuti grow in size and muscular strain. They gain thematic bulge and encroach on the central panels, contorting, swelling, craning. They are a picture of creation under strain, haggard, oppressed by the scenes to which they lend their framing bodies. But they are not alone feeling their own weight. Even the God of the celebrated midway panel struggles to lug himself off (an image, that of lifting oneself, which encapsulates the paradox of free creation: to be the moved and the mover in one); in fact, strictly speaking, God here doesn’t fly at all but sails on a squadron of short-winded, clearly overworked angels. His is no ethereal godhood: the hoisting cherubs sag with almost tragicomical emphasis. Not quite consciously the artista depicts what it feels like to keep

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his creative momentum airborne. And the physical and mental drama of it all, as for an artist who is situated halfway through the work, is that there is no guarantee of this momentum ever reaching its goal. This God of the midway panel who supposedly creates Adam—he stretches and stretches, and his entire body is a swell of effort whose pointed finger never touches the fruit of his work. The creation of Adam is of a divine spark yet to fly. For the artista caught up in creation, art is a verb, not a noun. There stands an unresolved gap between the creating will and the created thing. This gap has, needless to say, become iconic in our times—its iconicity dating back to the mid-twentieth century when people latched on to something in it, something meaningful and symbolic. But symbolic of what? It is certainly Michelangelo’s original invention. Nowhere in the Scriptures does God poke Adam into life. Former Renaissance depictions of such an event (notably Ghiberti’s bronze door of the Florence Sacristy, Uccello’s Creation of Adam in Santa Maria Novella, and Jacopo della Quercia’s relief sculpture at San Petronio Church in Bologna) are all very episcopal. It is creation as legislation, top-down directive, benediction from on high. In a way, it mirrors the statutory nature of artisanship which transfers prejudged standards to an object, as of the ruler to the ruled and of mind to matter. Michelangelo transforms this gesture from law-giving to yearning. The path from intention to creation is fraught with mysterious hindrance. There yawns between the creator and the work a wavering gap. Rodin said quite rightly that Michelangelo’s art “expresses restless energy, the will to act without the hope of success—in fine, the martyrdom of the person tormented by unrealizable aspirations.”43 Unrealizable these aspirations are, not because the artist sets his aim too high but because, being free, he logically cannot foretell what he is going to do nor, when he has finished, whether it satisfies his nameless desires. Free creation means, first of all, fumbling into the unknown, and the unknown, which requires unsleeping vigilance, is never freedom. It is watchfulness, anxiety, and hesitation. Evocative, in this respect, is the near absence of topographical markers which, residual and sketchy in the first half of Michelangelo’s epic, all but vanish in the second. The Creation proper in fact takes place nowhere in particular, in the infinite plaster sky. This blank is the material, the surface, the spirit in which Michelangelo progresses—the visible expanse of his indirection, his perplexity. This perplexity, however, is not really to be overcome. For a freedom that knows where it is going, or worse yet, attains what it is groping for, annuls itself. Hence, perhaps, the exquisite wound between intention and realization which stares out at the vault’s center: it is the avoidance of success—where success means the fulfillment, and therefore extinction, of one’s creative freedom. *

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The epic of artistic freedom counts on the usual cast of outside foes (patrons, public taste, institutions, “spies and saboteurs,” to believe Michelangelo). But freedom also has worse enemies on the inside. One such enemy is the self-abatement of creative freedom itself: whenever the creative act strikes in one direction, even randomly, it excludes all the other directions it could have travelled. Perfect freedom should be, on this account, inactive—which of course is a problem for the creative artist. Choose he must, but the choice is a bitter one, and the free artist resents the created form that does him the injury of giving up all the other forms he could have made. His ill will turns from the external enemies of freedom to its own offspring. Creative freedom thus comes to dislike its own exercise—and there, perhaps, we find the Michelangelesque form that coils and curls on itself, figures that fold in, seethe, glower, as if jealous that some inner fire is being leached out of them, perhaps aware that even the slightest sally of expression cramps their creative possibilities. Michelangelo oversaw the excavation of the ancient marble of Laocoön and His Sons in 1504, and it evidently made a great impression on him. Its depiction of an outbound force strangled by monstrous inbound restraint—it could have seemed to him a picture of expression throttling itself, of the wrangle between outwardness and inwardness, expression and containment, publicity and reserve. It is the wrangle which courses through Michelangelo’s contorted forms, perhaps the gist of what contemporaries called his bizarreness, his hideousness, his terribilità—or as we might say today, his neurosis: the twist of a creative mind in which the urge to let fly runs as strong as the urge to rein in. His is an aesthetic of the creative gesture second-guessed, vetted, vetoed; of a spark snuffed just a few seconds shy of bursting forth; of the aborted gesture, the action left ajar, the vacillation between lunging and flinching, which gives his David and Moses their terrifying ambivalence. Creative freedom eating itself, like a snake: perhaps this notion explains why Michelangelo should have insisted throughout the painting of the Sistine ceiling that he was not fit for the task. No è mia arte (this is not my art). But he also said, “I cannot live without painting.”44 In fact the two statements need not be contradictory. Taken together, they say that Michelangelo could not create without not being able to create: that he didn’t express without not wanting to express. This is a twisted feeling, but Michelangelo’s forms are twisted, tortured, and complicated. There is such a covert hunger for unfreedom inside his protestations of creative freedom and such a terrible urge to let fly in his constrained forms. If the Sistine ceiling is arguably the first out-and-out modern work of European art, it isn’t just because it portrays the eccentric individualist at work (self-reflexivity is not the sufficient ingredient of modern art); it is because it dramatizes a mode of expression that questions its claim to existence at every crook and turn. To be or not to be: that indeed is the question of the art called “modern.”

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Bad work Not, of course, that the Sistine ceiling is inert or understated or reserved. Every inch of its twelve thousand square feet proclaims the titanic drive that powered the four years of its creation. Typically, however, Michelangelo declared himself not entirely satisfied. He deemed it “not finished as he had wished, and obstructed by the pope’s haste.”45 It is amazing to hear that he would have wanted to stay longer in chains when his letters suggest that he couldn’t wait to pack up his gear and head back to Florence. But such is Michelangelo’s temperament that creation never does run smooth. Certainly the last painted panels, if they show him at his most unbridled, are not without rearward pensiveness, part regret and part resignation. His last Yahweh, unlike all prior depictions, looks backward at the completed ceiling rather than forward in the direction of its progress. Thinking back, backtracking, back-turning: such also is the motif of the surrounding three figures: of the Lybica Sybil who contorts to show a full dorsal span; of Jonah who is knocked on his back; of the prophet Jeremiah hunching in his doleful niche. A tradition has it that this dark and brooding Jeremiah is the artist’s self-portrait. If so, we should wonder why Michelangelo invited this most rueful and lamenting of prophets to flank the victory of being over nothingness and to watch the finale of the most glorious expense of ceiling in Christendom. Was Michelangelo unhappy about finishing the ceiling? In fact, we should put the question this way: Can an artista be satisfied with anything he creates? Michelangelo often cavils about the work being done but seldom, if ever, dilates on the work he has done. Temperamentally Michelangelo wasn’t one to be satisfied with much of anything, and this may explain why he was circumspect about his achievements. Once finished, the work dropped out of mind. Perhaps the parturition was all it ever was about, and the finished work never measured up to the vexations of its making. It may be that, like doleful Jeremiah, Michelangelo was disappointed. If so, this would be quite in the logic of being an artista. For if a “divine” artist invents forms and styles not seen before, it follows that the criteria of achievement by which to assess these strange new things are not yet existent. People, Vasari says, “gazed in silent astonishment” at Michelangelo’s works, and this gaping silence certainly evokes the puzzlement, the lack of certifying criteria by which to confirm or disconfirm the new work.46 This puzzlement, one must add, has to be the artist’s also who (unlike the craftsman) can never be altogether certain that he has done good—at least not officially, not objectively since he has only himself, his native genius, to vouch for it. And this is why, without an objective criterion of achievement, the joy of attainment must wither, together with the satisfaction of touching the limits of one’s art. An artista’s progress is now limitless, and a doubt can always becloud his most ringing triumphs.

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Michelangelo imbibes this welstchmerz of uncertainty; it makes him doubtful of art even as he gives soul to it. Of course the story of Genesis aids and abets this malaise—it being the story of a plan gone wrong, starting with a convulsive push that staggers into a saga of decay, disobedience, punishment, disarray, regret, death, and, at the end, Noah’s drunken sleep. For this downward journey Michelangelo is hardly to blame: it is part of neoplatonic Christian theology from Origen to Augustine and his disciples in 1500s’ Florence, that essence is superior to existence, that the world went terribly awry no sooner than created, and that a thing declines from its pristine state by existing at all. Existence is a flaw—a sin, a monstrousness which the artista, if he pauses a moment to consider, compounds by bringing yet more forms, flimsy forms, into the world. Here, perhaps, is a reason for Michelangelo’s repertoire of morbidly incurved, doleful types: his David of the knitted brows, his Moses of the marine-monster beard, his languid dukes of the Medici tomb, the convulsed seers and ignuti of the Sistine ceiling, and the disarrayed cohorts of his Last Judgment (about which, more later). In his youth Michelangelo imbibed the Augustinian sermons of the gruesome monk Savonarola, sermons full of the old theological grudge against existence. No è mia arte! No è mia professione: why not, given the moral context, take these protestations to say “I should not be in this impious business of making art.” All created forms are after all an aberration, a canker on the alabaster skin of non-existence. Though this conviction streaks through everything Michelangelo touches in his old age, it lurks also in his heyday; it even leads him to a way of making art that consists of withholding creation. Hurried, unpolished, deliberately flustered: the brushwork of the last panels shows its unfinishedness, as if the figures should wear the bruises of having been forced to be. In fact, this sketchiness marks the birth of a new style of art—a style that influenced all the great painters of the Cinquecento (Tintoretto, the mature Titian, El Greco, Pontormo) and artists thereafter (from Rubens to Delacroix and from Impressionism to twentieth-century Action Painting). It is indeed the style of modernity, which revels in the open-ended, the unfinished, and the non-finito. Why this is so—why artistic modernity espoused the unfinished—is the question that next calls for our attention.

Non-finito That which is finished is fine, perchance even refined; that which is not, deficient. This distinction is a natural prejudice of the human mind: the bridge that stops halfway across a stream invites the eye to run the full span. The unfinished sentence teases the tongue to offer a conclusion. We groan when a storyline peters out. This doesn’t mean that we may not come to

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enjoy that groan. In fact, Michelangelo was among the first to awaken us to the aesthetic thrill of the unfinished. Historically speaking, this thrill requires a ripe aesthetic culture. Technical polish first has to be won before its deliberate omission can seem aesthetically pleasing. What’s done badly because no one can do it well doesn’t tickle the artistic nerve. Another necessary condition for a non-finito style to arise is a general interest in the artist as individual personality. One has to care that the artist means to convey something by leaving things unfinished. In this light did Pliny the Elder, who first remarked on the non-finito, try to explain why it pleases so: It is a very unusual and memorable fact that the last works of artists and their unfinished pictures . . . are more admired than those which they finished, because in them are seen the sketches left visible and the artists’ actual thoughts . . . and we feel regret that the artist’s hand while engaged in the work was removed by death.47 The artist’s thought process; human finitude despairing of the infinitude of its own aspirations; the sublimity of an endeavor, art, that “was always a thing in process and unfinished” (inchoata semper arte et imperfecta): such are the charms of the non-finito. We should note, however, that Pliny only has in mind accidentally unfinished art. Where the strong ethic of craftsmanship prevails, people don’t seem to enjoy a willfully incomplete job: it savors of negligence. This ethic is behind Alberti’s recommendation in the fifteenth century that “whatever work you begin should be completed in every respect. . . . Some painters and sculptors begin some work with great enthusiasm, then . . . abandon it in a rough and unfinished state. . . . I certainly disapprove.”48 Now fast-forward a century and Vasari cannot speak highly enough of the unfinished: “Paintings, sculpture or whatever have more beauty and great force when they are a beautiful sketch than when they are finished.”49 Great are those who “lift their hand from the work they are doing” before it is overly finished; brilliant is “the frenzy of art that expresses the idea in a few strokes.”50 What happened in the meanwhile to turn the non-finito from an opportune accident into an aesthetic desideratum is twofold: first, the rise of the legend of the artista whose inspired originality swipes aside craft; second, the legend of art’s intellectualism—its transfer from the hand to the mind. For Vasari, non-finito expresses the superiority of mind over mechanical skill. The latter scrambles to keep pace with the former, which thereby appears loftier: “So perfect was [Michelangelo’s] imagination, and the things he conceived in idea were such, that not being able to express concepts so great and awesome with his hands, . . . he abandoned his works.”51 The same was true of Leonardo whose “hand could not keep up with his intellect.”52 The unfinished here isn’t lack of perfection; it is not what the Quattrocento

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Florentine scholar Poliziano had in mind when he wrote that “art should always be something begun and unfinished” because God alone is capable of perfection.53 For Vasari, on the contrary, the unfinished happens because the artist is filled to the brim with a perfect vision which it isn’t always necessary or desirable to express. On this account, the work’s imperfection can signal artistic greatness. Of Michelangelo’s Madonna in the Medici Chapel, Vasari says that “although unfinished, the perfection of the work is plain to see.”54 Perfection hereby divorces its etymology (perfacere, to bring to completion): henceforth a work of art can be perfect for the reason that it is not finished. We have reached the dawn of a legend that underpins modern art, the legend that artistry is independent of craftsmanship, that a certain sublimity of understanding can, and should, surpass its material manifestation, and that a work of art can be superior while being inferior in form and facture. Vasari, for one, thought Leonardo’s Mona Lisa more beautiful for being unfinished. More beautiful, perhaps, for breathing the spirit of freedom, for being the child of an artist who is always doing and is never done— not done in by factual achievement. Faciebat (was doing) is perfection (fecit). Hence perhaps Titian’s curious signature on the baseboard of his Annunciation of 1559–64: “Titianus fecit fecit,” he magisterially wrote on the foreground. Since one “fecit” (has done) is enough, it may be that the second is there to confirm that, despite the unfinished appearance of it all (and by now Titian is a full-on practitioner of the non-finito, of the “broad and even coarse sweep of the brush”—to quote Vasari), the work’s imperfection is its perfection. “Faciebat” is “fecit fecit.” As it happens (and as revealed by X-ray analysis), Titian painted “fecit, fecit” on top of an earlier, wiped-out “faciebat”: the unfinishedness of this painting is really what the artist intends. It is the new finish. This is a way for the painter to declare the sovereignty of a vision so personal that it cannot shrink into a fully worked-out form. We are here at the doorstep of an aesthetic which, three centuries hence, would state that the look of a work of art counts for less than its being declared a work of art.

To do and not to do For our purpose, it does not matter whether Titian’s late, careless style is intentional, as the critic Kenneth Clark proposed;55 whether it signals an overworked artist well into his three score years and ten; or whether it is the effect of neurological and physical deterioration.56 What matters is to understand why the imperfect style has come to set the tone of modern art—so much so that such obviously tired and slapdash paintings as Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas (1570–76) are now considered in every way wonderful and precious. The philosopher Iris Murdoch held it to be no less than the greatest painting in the Western canon. Before 1550, an incomplete work

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of art was understood to be imperfect in equal measure (so even admirers of Paolo Uccello conceded); after 1550, incompletion becomes part of the charm, the intention, the psychological depth of a piece. Unfinished and rough-hewn as they were, Vasari for example believed Michelangelo’s old-age Pietas to betoken genius beyond form and description. (Rodin agreed that Michelangelo’s dotage works were among his greatest.) And it continues thence. In the seventeenth century, La Rochefoucauld avers, “Some beautiful objects shine the better for remaining imperfect rather than for being finished.”57 And Reynolds in the eighteenth, “We accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised in the sketch.”58 Thus, Delacroix who denounces the injury that consists of touching up “the happy negligences which an artist delights in,” saying also “cold exactitude is not art . . . and the so-called conscientiousness of most painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.”59 “Is a picture ever finished?” asks Théophile Doré, champion of the Impressionists.60 Most certainly not, according to Van Gogh who approved of “the critics who say that my pictures are not finished.”61 Sketches, studies, and fragments, process works, happenings, interactive art: in such proud negligees does the modern work of art like to walk, floating on Nietzsche’s Reiz der Unvollkommenheit (the charm of imperfection). In the sixteenth century the trend of collecting unfinished works by dead artists began; in the eighteenth, collectors swooped up unfinished works by living legends; in the nineteenth, artists like Corot and Turner worked hard at making their paintings seem sur le vif, in medias res. Giacometti said that “Cézanne never really finished anything. He went as far as he could, then abandoned the job. That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.”62 Not only terrible perhaps but also heroic. The work is imperfect because the artist gave it his heart and soul and went as far as he could. Thus, art becomes a vast unmapped continent, a mysterium tremendum; it becomes “Art,” a quest as chivalrous as ever there was, from which the artist returns with mangled and incomplete pieces, the relics of a search sublime. This legend of modern art begins in the Quintecento, and before we return to Michelangelo, we should consider his better in the art of leaving things unfinished, Leonardo. *

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Was there ever as dilatory an artist as Leonardo? Even Vasari was mystified: How could a genius be so stinting with his gifts? Leonardo’s career is a checkerwork of abandoned and unfinished works, undelivered commissions, contracts that drag on for a quarter century (e.g., The Virgin of the Rocks), long intervals during which he seems to forget about painting. The record of omission is so heavy that Vasari imagines Leonardo to have repented on his deathbed for having “offended God and mankind in not labouring at his art,

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as he ought to have done.”63 This offense has sparked many an explanation. Vasari traces it to some inborn impatience that prompts the artist “to begin by thinking about the end before he starts the work.”64 Others have explained that art disputed with a multitude of Leonardo’s other interests—botany, anatomy, geology, cartography, music, mathematics, engineering, the writing of masques and riddles and fantasies, and court diplomacy. Others yet have adduced a mysterious psychic wound (e.g., Freud’s sanatorium gossip according to which Leonardo didn’t paint because he didn’t have sex, and he didn’t have sex because it reminded him of Mom and Dad). The procrastination, it must be said, baffled the artist himself: “Tell me if anything ever got done. Tell me if I ever achieved anything,” he wondered at the age of sixty-seven.65 He often left paintings unfinished or else interminably retouched them (he never did turn the Mona Lisa over to its Florentine patron, but honed it for a decade and arguably longer). His reluctance to finish seeped into his brush, blurred its lines, feathered contours, melted hues and values. Blurry, smoky, shadowy, crepuscular, for these mysterious qualities, Leonardo’s contemporaries coined a term sfumato. Sfumato is a proto-Romantic insurrection against Quattrocento clarity and rationalism; it is the avoidance of finality made visible, unfinishedness soaking the entire painting. The artist never declares himself; he dodges, skirts, postpones the final judgment, plays hide-and-seek behind intimations of a stroke that never comes. This way we shall never know his scope. Never was the immensity of his genius summarized on canvas. Thus, the infinitude of art gave rise to the legend of the infinity of the artist’s mind, itself a part of the humanist creed concerning man—“infinite in faculty . . . in apprehension how like a god.” In this light did Vasari interpret Michelangelo’s late unfinished works which, he argued, expressed a genius grown so sublime and “a judgment so ripe that nothing could content him.”66 And thus art henceforth: it is the visible crest of a psychic infinity which no container can hold and no manifestation can satisfy—not only a hint of the deus absconditus within but also the start of a legend of modern art according to which the measure of genius is how much it withholds.

Tired art Of course, a more down-to-earth explanation for why Leonardo finished so few of his works is that he was tired of art (it happens: see Botticelli, Parmigianino, Shakespeare, Antoine-Jean Gros, Rossini, Rimbaud, Duchamp, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc.). But Michelangelo put a twist to art fatigue: he was never tired of telling everyone how much art tired him out, and all that business of creating exhausted him and brought it to death’s door. To hear him, Michelangelo was always dying of overwork. “Art . . . has brought me to this—poor, old, and a slave . . . I am undone if I do not

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soon die.”67 This lament over impending death (la mia propinqua morte) started fifty years before Michelangelo breathed his last. “I perish day by day, / the sunshine fails, the / shadows grow more dreary / And I am near to fall, infirm and weary”: he still had thirty years to live when he penned these lines.68 Io sono vechio, he declared in 1516 (“I am old”) and thereafter spent forty-eight years being old. In every ailment (gout, arthritic back, colic pains, blindness, tinnitus, the stone, teeth, the ague) he saw a harbinger of death, on which he dwelled with Dominican fervor.69 “My birth is playing with death”; “Death, whereat I live and eat on credit,” and “O sweet sweet death, I am almost numbered with the dead”: such morsels were of course common parlance in Michelangelo’s days, but he seems to have taken mortality very much to heart.70 So much so indeed that it filtered into his work, which he was prone to approach from an eschatological angle. “I have reached the twenty-fourth hour of my day, and no project arises in my brain which has not the figure of death carved upon it,” he says, now in his last decades.71 He is old and tired, of course, but this tiredness mutates into a general lassitude with art: “Painting and sculpture will no longer serve/to calm my soul.”72 But the point is that, weary as he was of art, he never stopped making art even onto the penultimate day of his eighty-nine years. Most people quit, if they lost the taste for their avocation. Not so Michelangelo who used art to express his resignation from art. In a stanza he composes at the time, he writes, “If in Thy name I have conceived any image / it is not without the accompaniment of death, / whereat art and genius dissolve.”73 He makes art, then, to signify that he is done making art or that he has no art left in him. This tiredness is especially acute in old age (he told Vasari he had done his last frescoes, The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of St Peter, “with great fatigue”—he is in his seventies, and it shows); but in fact Michelangelo expressed fatigue, disappointment, and disaffection continuously from his thirties onward. His fresco of The Last Judgment (1536–41) caused a bit of an uproar, so jarring and strange it looked, and not in the sweeping, irresistible way of the Sistine ceiling right above. A tumble of “acrobats and actors,” decreed the tastemaker of the age, Aretino. Michelangelo seemed to have used the altar wall as a sketch pad of crowded studies in anatomical contortion. That dies irae is quite a dies confusionis, and bodies tumble hither and thither, the saved looking as affrighted as the doomed, and the difference between them rather less clear than it should. The presiding judge, Christ our Lord, is no model of Solomonic lucidity; he sidles and turns in disgust or disappointment or petulance—it is hard to tell which, as though he were deeply displeased by the proceedings, as though Michelangelo himself is turning away from his wall. There is a defiant melancholy through it all, a militant misanthropy, a violent desire to throw in the towel, and do so with a grandiose display of displeasure and offended feeling. Michelangelo is then sixty-five and a living legend. He hardly has to prove himself (if evidence is needed that he is the greatest living artist, one

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only has to look up at the ceiling). Yet he seems to use this license not to assert himself but to throw everything into doubt. His taste for the strenuous appears to milk complexity for its own sake. Where the ceiling was an exercise in simplification, the altar wall is one of overkill. Quoting himself without restraint, Michelangelo piles on figures and gestures that separately are wonderful to behold yet add up to less than the sum of their parts. He seems to know that, whatever he is doing now in 1540, it cannot rival what he painted thirty years earlier on the adjacent ceiling. This reflection pushes him into a kind of anarchic laissez-faire, a weary impatience that is past caring what comes out. This is the last judgment indeed—the one which releases the artista from standards of agreeableness and fitness for purpose. And the public knew it: though they had learned to worship the name of Michelangelo, the disappointment can be felt between the lines. The curia was aghast. Many praised it absent-mindedly; others, like Aretino, mocked it in print. But the real historical upshot of the story is that this expressive excess, this careless impatience of design, this disregard for public approval was a sign of things to come. It inaugurated a new style and a new aesthetic understanding. The style is mannerism, and the understanding is artistic modernity—the notion that the artist is not there to serve the artifact, but that the artifact is there to convey the artist’s moods about art. *

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Mannerism is generally understood to be the Renaissance in decline, living off its spent momentum. Downstream artists (“de-cadere,” fallen off, decadent) are prone to self-conscious imitation and the sort of exaggerated gesture that consists of forcibly resuscitating old formulas. The mannerists of the Cinquecento knew their culture to be enfeebled. Their once independent citystates had succumbed to foreign powers and their puppet dynasts. Northern Europe still looked to Italian artists for training, but no longer to set the direction. Vasari’s comment that “the arts, like men themselves, are born, grow up, and become old and die” is entirely typical of the mannerist mood of valediction.74 Now, said the connoisseur Giulio Mancini in 1620, is a time of “senescence and decrepitude.”75 “We have seen the best of our time” moans the attendant lord in King Lear: this conviction infuses the mannerist mood, which battles between old-age bouts of fussiness and carelessness, mincing exactitude and dispatch. Such is Michelangelo’s late manner, as is the style of Pontormo, Parmigianino, Rosso Fiorentino, Tintoretto, and the late Titian. Gone are the poise and polish of 1500; forms now complicate themselves—sketchy, wavering, cramped. The sulkiness is assisted by a new belief that art is less an object of venerable craft than a vessel of idiosyncratic vision. This, the likes of Vasari praise to the sky, while often the patron has to content himself with disappointment.

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It is then artists like moody Titian and intractable Tintoretto take on and abandon extravagant projects or renege on commissions. Sometimes they leave patches of underpainting in the composition, and customers ask for their money back. Aretino suggested that his portrait by Titian could have been better. So did Prince Philip of Spain, who grumbled at the high-price sketchiness.76 Even the usually adulatory Vasari wondered if Tintoretto sometimes painted “to say it all was painted as a joke”—so glaring was the haste, so rash was the clash of bright and stygian, so precipitate the squeeze and stretch of forms.77 The doubt that it is all a hoax would have mortified a Piero della Francesca or a Raphael who prided themselves on flawless work. Not the mannerist painter. When Michelangelo says of his Paolina frescoes that “I shall paint badly and make miserable things” (op. cit.) he is claiming a new license—that of exercising his ill-tempered freedom which, whatever the results, will want to be reckoned on a par with the best. This is the mannerist turn. Gauche, odd, awry, unpolished, clumsy: after the masters (Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, mainly) made these traits aesthetically interesting, others rushed to emulate the impatient style. Not all results were desirable. Vasari observed that Titian’s “method of painting is the reason for clumsy pictures painted by many artists who have tried to imitate him.”78 Clumsy art, or clumsiness as an art, or the willful deterioration of inherited tradition as a way of signifying genius: this, if we follow Vasari, was already in the air during the mannerist period which, in this sense, set the pattern for all mannerist movements to come, the avant-garde of 1910 included. The rise of “bad art,” of clumsiness as a style, is inexplicable without the social ascendency of artists, and in particular the sense that their power of making springs from a power of vision which is unique and honorable. Perhaps clumsy art vexes and disconcerts, but that is the price well worth paying for intellectual freedom (a new idea, born of the Reformation, which extended liberty from conscience, to worship, assembly, movement, and finally expression). Back in 1510 Michelangelo had to swallow back his protestations of expressive freedom but by century’s end every bottega apprentice could very well assume its right. An “artist’s intellect must be . . . free, his spirit unfettered and unrestrained by servitude to mechanical rules,” said the mannerist painter Federico Zuccari.79 In the same vein, Giordano Bruno asseverated that “rules are not the source of poetry but poetry is the source of rules, and there are as many rules as they are artists.”80 Either art is free or it isn’t quite art. This professional “newfound freedom,” to quote Vasari, expressed itself in a “freer style.” Mannerism is what happens to art when artists throw off their shackles. Yet we call it mannerism and not, say, freeism because artistic freedom doesn’t necessarily beget a “freer style.” Sometimes, in fact, it produces just the opposite. In El Greco, Rosso Fiorentino, Jacobo Bassano, Pontormo, or Tintoretto, we find an emphatically distinct personality of style, a tendency toward hyperbole, “conceit,” and stylistic deformation. We are reasonably sure that

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these artists imbibed the legend of the opinionatedly free artista. Yet instead of being energized by freedom their paintings look frazzled. Freedom comes without a rudder, and their pictures often feel the absence. They fumble for a missing center around which disoriented figures stumble and whirl and swoon, helpless, adrift, off-kilter, erratic, strident and glum, fierce and fay at once. The picture is all violent contrasts, indecisive, uneasy. If this is freedom, it doesn’t look like much fun. In fact, it looks downright exhausting. The mannerist painter, we should say, ran into the paradox of freedom that underpins so much modern art. The paradox is this: When art is free, any program of action is questionable. Why do this rather than that? Why do it at all? Freedom can undercut action. Let us picture our emancipated painter setting out to do X. What forces him to pursue X? Nothing. Indeed if he is free, he should rebel against the ineluctability of doing X. But as soon as he makes it his purpose to turn against X, his freedom demands that he not commit to it either, lest he become less free. And so the artist strikes in another direction which, once stated, can be (should be, if freedom has anything to do with it) just as promptly renounced. In the end, the free artist can do anything, but does nothing for fear of having to do it. He hurtles in a whirlpool of self-given and self-abolished rules, maddened by freedom. Of this whirling uncertainty nothing gives a better rendition than the vortex composition of many mannerist pictures where parabolic garlands of figures seem like satellites adrift around an exploded star. Self-rule is an infinite spiral, and to be drawn into this spiral is not freedom. The creativity that admits no magnetic force outside of its own is tense, expectant, unsettled, dissatisfied like Michelangelo, inconclusive like Leonardo, uneasy like Pontormo’s “bizarre and fantastic brain that never was content with anything,” or mad like Tasso.81 As for those who find the “newfound freedom” unbearable, they seek relief in a formalism: the mannerist wavering freezes into an automatic style. Art then becomes “artsy,” artful, and artificial; it becomes outrageously stylistic and refined—a sign of artistic freedom that has come to fear itself and congeals into the waxwork immobilities of Bronzino, Parmigianino, and the School of Fontainebleau. This outcome is an ever-present possibility of modern art henceforth; it is the risk that creative freedom, resentful of its self-begotten disquiet, turns on itself, mocks and parodies its own convulsions, and congeals into a beautiful academic corpse.

Anti-art This artistic lassitude—this art that wearies of art—comes to light in the masterpiece of Michelangelo we have kept for last: the tomb sculptures of the Medici sacristy. This work, which occupies him for the better part of the 1520s, sees the artista back in his native Florence, high on the triumph of the

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Sistine ceiling, low on the unfolding fiasco of the Julius tomb, and ever beset with family worries and artistic paranoia. As it happens, he is commissioned to sculpt a funeral monument for the Medici family. Mournfulness is part of the deal, but what comes out of Michelangelo’s chisel seems to mourn something beyond the illustrious scions. The trademark pugnacity, the resolve to wring a form out of adversity—it all seems to have sighed out of him. In its place, a pall of disenchantment, an inexpressible weariness. Whether art is worth the effort, whether it leads to the good and the true, whether it pleases God, not to mention Michelangelo himself, the disenchantment that never ceases harassing him after 1535 hovers above the Medici Tombs. They are unfinished, these tombs (accidentally unfinished when Michelangelo is recalled to Rome by yet another cranky pope in 1534), yet their incompletion is thematically of a piece with their form which looks ever so reluctant to exist. Who dragged them out of their sleep of stone to leave them asprawl on coffins? Here are Dawn and Twilight on Giuliano’s tomb, and Day and Night on Lorenzo’s. They would have us ponder the brevity of life, perhaps shed a tear over the dear departed. Yet how bizarre, how abortive, how morbid their aspect. Theirs is the musculature of abattoir meat, heavy, inert, viscerous. Night’s breasts are pendulous gourds, tumors of femineity on a male torso that slides, like a centaur, into equine hamstrings. They are elephantine and palsied, swooning and arthritic, liquid and cramped. They wear their anatomies like malignant growths. They would crawl back into themselves if they could. The effect is unnerving, like a diatribe against the human body, against the vanity of being and making and shaping. It is a question mark roping the existence of art into its noose: an outbreak of modern art. As for the two dukes, Michelangelo makes every effort to lend them grace and valor. Only, he goes too far: he confabulates, he eroticizes, he frets and lengthens to excess. Giulano’s fustian torso, all Roman breastplate and insignia, extends into meandering arms that end in the hands of a nervous scribe. Seen from below, his swanlike neck seems to chase and swallow his diminutive head. The serpentine lines meander and postpone and delay, and when they finally arrive, they peter out, like Hamlet’s plot. Rather than projecting strength, the two sinuous dukes monumentalize existential vacancy. The wonder is that nothing in this tomb is technically weak. It shows Michelangelo in peak form, doing exactly what he means to do. Only, what he means to do is not to ride his fluency but to punish it—as if he were sickened by his own ability, which he teases and complicates and puts to the question. The result is an “artful” art, “difficult” art, an art cramped with self-consciousness—an art which, in the fullness of its strength, condemns itself, and, in this act of self-harm, invents modern art. There was a time where a younger, more pugnacious Michelangelo was entranced by the fight to create (e.g., his Lord of Hosts plowing through

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the world’s beginning). Now he seems to have given up. He pens this poem about the making of Day and Night: Day and Night speak and say: “We, in our swift course, have led Duke Giuliano to his death. . . . Having been killed by us, he, being dead, has deprived us of light, and by closing his eyes has shut ours, which no longer shine upon the earth. What might he have done with us, then, if he had lived?”82 Time has killed Duke Giuliano, who, being dead, withholds his light from time. Now time (i.e., the two figures of Day and Night) bemoans his lost attention. But whose attention is it really? Could it be the light of the man who turned away from sculpting them and left them unfinished? If so, these sculptures depict resignation from art, and this may be the source of their famous unease: it is the unease of anti-art, of an art that musters its resources to abort itself. Thus, speaks Night in Michelangelo’s quatrain: Sleep is dear to me, and being of stone is dearer, As long as injury and shame endure; Not to see or hear is a great boon to me; Therefore, do not wake me.83 There perhaps is the mystery of the coiling, hunching, huddling Michelangesque figure. It would rather not be. Day and Night mourn, not so much the passing of existence, as the fact that existence ever has to happen. Expression complicatedly doubts his own reason to be, and out of this doubt makes art modern. *

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There is no concept of “anti-art art” in the sixteenth century. Yet the malaise of it—the languor, the moody clumsiness, the non-finito—is rampant. “The study of painting is toilsome, and the further one advances into it, the more difficulties appear, and the sea grows larger and larger,” confessed Tintoretto.84 This is not an uncommon complaint—in fact it is rather typical of the general rhetoric of mannerist art. Its consummate expression is the aforementioned Flaying of Marsyas by Titian. To judge it fairly, we must take into account Titian’s extreme old age at the time of painting it. The Flaying of Marsyas is Titian’s testament: probably his very last painting, as his eyesight was giving out, and his hand shook beyond hope. But it is testamentary because the subject matter is art. According to the myth, Marsyas the piper made such beautiful music that jealous Apollo challenged him to a contest. Apollo resorted to trickery and defeated the human piper. For his punishment Marsyas is tied to a tree

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and skinned alive—there to howl while the Lord of Music fiddles, and this is what Titian depicts. The scene is crammed with symbolic clues: here is Marsyas, who stands for human artifice; and here is Apollo, the divine creator. Painters before and after Titian not uncommonly signify their sympathy for the tortured musician (e.g., Ribera, Giordano). But Titian is more ambivalent. He depicts himself in the person of Midas the sage who gazes blankly as the orgy of cruelty wheels around him. Titian gives us the frenzied sadism, the mayhem of malice, but he also gives us the moody apathy and detachment—even though the horror is committed on his kin. Human artistry is put to rack, and he condones it. Is Titian punishing the humanist dream of establishing order, harmony, and reason in the word? This would explain why the painting seeps with world-weariness, and Titian harrows the skin of his canvas as though it were Marsyas’s flesh. Of his famed smooth Giorgionesque style, he now makes ribbons, worries his scene (“worrying” is hunting lingo for hounds tearing a quarry to pieces) into streaks of veiny blue and lurid red. The brush is a lash, it is punishment, a gory assault on art-making. It is as though dying Titian used his last strength to tear down painting. If a testament it is, it is of Titian sentencing his life’s work to an agonizing death. It is failing art determined to see all art fail and die along with it. This, to the art historian, would be a valetudinarian oddity, an aged painter’s lapse, were it not that it foreshadows a new way of art. The art whose passion (in the dual sense of love and suffering) is art itself lays the ground for modern art. Up till now we have seen how this love and suffering play in the theater and in the plastic arts. We now have to see how it invented the archetypally modern narrative form, the novel.

3 Don Quixote, or the Weakness of Fiction

The book that started it all Don Quixote joins Hamlet and Michelangelo in the cultural period that liberated art from indenture to prayer, decoration, and amusement. Following this emancipation, art was reckoned to be about originality, freedom, creativity, novelty, self-consciousness, and inspiration. Art discovered that it was concerned mostly with itself and created mostly for the artist’s, rather than the patron’s, sake. It was now in the service of personal actualization. On the divide between medieval to early Renaissance art and late Renaissance to modern art, Michelangelo, Hamlet, and Don Quixote stand like liminal stones. To a medieval person, they would probably be incomprehensible; to us they make a whole world of sense. Indeed, they stand for who we are, for art and culture, and for the life of the mind as we understand it. Four hundred years after Miguel de Cervantes (1547– 1616) published The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, its wiry horseman and pot-bellied squire are still trotting across our horizon— the horizon of modernity they conjured out of thin air and draped across our stage. Don Quixote shot to fame right on its publication in 1605 as though it packed a philosophy of life bursting to break free. Such was the success that Cervantes penned a second volume ten years later, partly to sate an avid public, partly to reclaim a pair of characters whom apocryphal sequels and popular pantomimes had taken out of his hands. The novel was a hit across every layer of society. It amused the royal courts and jollified the taverns. Effigies of Quixote and Sancho appeared in costumed festivals as far abroad as Mexico and Peru in the first decade of its publication.1 So did English and French translations, within seven years of Part I. Meanwhile the complete novel has never gone out of print since the publication of Part II in

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1615. It is, by some accounts, the most reprinted work of fiction in the West. Something about Don Quixote resonates. It has been surmised that this resonance has to do with Don Quixote inventing the modern novel—creating the tone and pattern in which we imagine fiction, especially Modernist fiction. For it is really for the twentieth century that Don Quixote gains the reputation of an epoch-making book— starting with the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s assertion that “every novel bears Don Quixote within it like an inner filigree.”2 Fueling the legend, Trilling claimed that “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote,” and Harry Levin offered that “Cervantes continues to be the exemplary novelist [who] sets the example of all other novelists to follow.”3 Daniel Boorstin agreed that Don Quixote “created the Western novel” and that Cervantes plays “a role among creators of our modern world comparable to that of Copernicus.”4 Bidding up the rhetoric, Carlos Fuentes crowns Don Quixote “the first modern novel, perhaps the most eternal novel ever written and certainly the fountainhead of European and American fiction.”5 Whereafter Harold Bloom can only affirm that Don Quixote “contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”6 Don Quixote, then, is our summa, our entelechy, our origin story, the book that made us modern.7 My aim is not to dispute this affluent praise but to take seriously the fact that the modern aesthetic mind believes it began there, in Don Quixote. It makes it work as a guide to understand who we think we are and what Modernism is up to.

Out with the old Modernity, as the word suggests, is about the “now” (modus), which means it is about retiring the old. And not just outmoding it but (herein lies the modern twist of it) making a great show of doing so. Hence Cervantes, who informs his reader that Don Quixote was designed to smash an old narrative template. First stated in the prologue and reiterated in the last line of the novel, the aim was to derribar la máquina mal fundada destos cabarellescos libros: to dismantle the worn-out apparatus, the squeaky stage machinery, the threadbare plot of fifteenth-century pseudo-medieval knightly romances. In truth, these knights-and-shepherds romances were already quite brittle by the time Cervantes took the hammer to them.8 What he wanted his public to notice, therefore, was his act of pushing out the old; he wanted his public to enjoy being modern, that is, repudiators. Here we stumble on one of the contradictions of modernity, that it champions the now in terms of the past and looks forward by glancing backward. Thus, Don Quixote, which unfolds in the rearview mode that is parody. Of course, parody is not strictly imitative. Rather, it mimics an established cultural form in order to impart that the present “we” does not

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subscribe to the past and its associated ways of life. Readers are invited to read on while watching themselves read—in the mode of irony, of selfconsciousness: in order, not to enter an imaginary world but to pause in disbelief right at the doorstep. This non-participation is an essential ingredient of the modern recipe. Yet, what it gives in terms of relative freedom (the freedom, say, of resisting enthrallment), it takes away in terms of real emancipation. Parody is parasitic on the discourse it lampoons. Don Quixote tells us that the late Renaissance had outgrown a certain idealizing style of chivalric storytelling. But outgrowing a style is not the same thing as innovating. A caricature is a roundabout compliment to tradition. It creates with borrowed bits of costume and, in this sense, fails to be genuinely novel. If we accept the critical consensus according to which Don Quixote invents the modern novel (from the Italian novella, “little new thing”), we must also weigh the possibility that the modern novel springs from the failure of envisioning novel-ty. Perhaps the novel began as the little new thing that didn’t quite know how to make it new. Don Quixote proceeds a bit like its hero when he launches on the roads of La Mancha (I, chapter 2): with extreme diffidence. As he rides onward, he plays the scene backward. He muses that someday his first adventure will be recounted by a bard who will sing in the old ways of Amadís of Gaul, Orlando Furioso, or Don Florisel de Niquea. Don Quixote will have us know that the Middle Ages are over and that nothing can bring back their certainties and fixities and stabilities. Yet it is a symptom of the inherent fragility of modernity that Cervantes pictures the present and future of literature as an ironic regurgitation of the old. The question is this: How much do we surpass the past by mocking it? How strong indeed is the modern mind? Because the novel has us laugh at a knight for being softheaded and impressionable and trusting and idealistic, we by contrast are supposed to be clear-eyed, hardheaded, skeptical, realistic, and demystifying. These mental habits, so long as they concern themselves with historical selfconsciousness, do not produce emancipation; rather, they are a different way of inhabiting history. Artistic novelty here seems to consist not of new forms but of handling tradition with irony, then satisfying oneself that this act of manipulation is innovation. Theorizing about novelty is not the same thing as novelty. That this theorizing transformed literature, there is no doubt; that it set modernity on a positive, self-assured footing is much less certain—an uncertainty that stamps the adventure of inventing Don Quixote.

Out with the new This impertinent, iconoclastic novel—we do well to remember that it isn’t the brainchild of a young firebrand. It is the creation of a disenchanted old man living on the edge of indigence and dishonor. Cervantes is fifty-six

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years old when he begins Part I of Don Quixote, and sixty-six when he hands Part II to the printer. By the existential bookkeeping of the time, he is ancient—ancient and worn out by six decades of hard luck as a fugitive of the law, an exile, a gang-pressed soldier, an amputee, a slave captive of the Barbary Coast, a penurious tax-and-store collector who ends up twice in debtor’s prison, a failed playwright (of the thirty plays he wrote, only two have survived; and his first novel La Galatea of 1585 made so small a dent that for most of the seventeenth century it was near impossible to find a copy). In short, the man who sits down to pen Don Quixote has failed in his profession, failed in his domestic life, and failed at literature.9 In fact, Cervantes tells us that his imagination “engendered” Don Quixote during a stay in jail in 1597 when the future was a prison wall. Don Quixote is the offspring of a man who drank disillusion to the lees; more to the point, it is written by someone who has stopped believing not only in knightly romance but also in moral idealism and the salve of literature—that it can lift us above the wreckage of life. This existential disenchantment meshed with the culture-wide pessimism that gripped Spain in the seventeenth century. The tale of a down-at-heel grandee who has the enchantment thrashed out of him by hard-knuckled reality—it spoke to a Spanish Golden Age recently fallen from dreams of gold and glory. The Quixotes of the old feudal class were filing meekly into the ranks of Philip II’s absolutist state monarchy. As for the Sanchos of the world, they struggled through price inflation, shortages, food riots, and pauperization. Once outward-looking, Spain retrenched into a religiontinted authoritarian fatalism known as “the great disillusion,” el desengaño of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 This realization that certain dreams had failed did not, however, spur Spaniards to find out what ailed those dreams and thereafter to dream better dreams. Rather, it spurred vengeance against dreaming itself. All illusions, all high-minded aspirations, all stout hearts, and daydreamers were to blame. So down came the blows on Quixote, the dreamer par excellence, beaten, flogged, and knocked about on the roads of disenchanted Spain. It was the lynching of hope and idealism by a disabused people. See how this poor fool dreamed of castles in Spain. What an amusing humiliation! What a tickling comedown! This was Cervantes’s traveling show for a disenchanted populace—the seedy innkeepers, rustics, trollops, petty lords, and scheming squires that people his world. Quixote is their antipode but not their savior. He does not lead his world out of disenchantment. In fact, he embodies every trait of the newly hardened, anti-humanist, reactionary Spanish attitude: his pedantry, bullheadedness, dogmatic certitude, and dislike of compromise—all express and romanticize the naysaying solipsism of Spanish culture over the next three centuries. Quixote is, in other words, no Renaissance man. Unable to cope with the world as it is, he offers no solution—nothing but forlorn escapism, an enchanted journey that ends in the medieval moral that life wades in the

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slough of error and that all worldly endeavors end in pain. This, then, is the novel that so many have called the paragon of modernity, the novel that contains all novels to come: a contraband of medieval pessimism presented as an anti-medieval lampoon. To be sure, Quixote’s madness does make him a bit of an outsider. Yet even his madness is dogmatic and reactionary: it consists of stubborn obedience to a text, a rigid code of conduct, an ideology. If he has no place in society, it’s not because he is right and society is wrong or vice versa but because both are wrong. Modern as it is, Cervantes’s vision is irredeemably pessimistic—and no doubt it is one of the singular traits of modernity that it is, on the whole, disenchanted.

In sackcloth and ashes Don Quixote is determined to inflict this disenchantment on everything it touches, including its very own fictional fabric. Cervantes was obviously tired of the squeaky clichés, serendipities, and moral platitudes of the formulaic narrative maquína. But something more than the affectations of romance literature irked him; he seemed to chafe also at a sincere, wholehearted, uncomplicated way of enjoying literature. Cervantes wanted to tear down that credulous sincerity, which to his taste was faintly plebian: it was the way of “the presumptuous mob that tend to read those books . . . and want them.”11 To this populace of inn courts and market stalls, Don Quixote directed a scolding laughter, pillorying a character of near monomaniacal gullibility as a warning against all gullibility. Whoever reads Don Quixote is asked to stand guard against fiction or else be as foolish as the Don. Desengaño, in other words, is supposed to be our modus operandi, and to the joys of immersion we are to substitute the learned enjoyment of a technical, demystifying eye—one that relishes the plot and characterization, to be sure, although always analytically. Thus Cervantes seldom tires of reminding us that his fiction is just that, words on paper. Scarcely a page goes by that doesn’t flag a narrative break here, an authorial aside there, a discussion of textual sources, an admission of errors, or a dispute over the veracity of recorded events, reminders that the tale of the Ingenious Gentleman is the composite of at least three textual layers (an Arabic historian, his Spanish translator, and the adaptor of this Spanish translation). These interferences keep telling us that we must resist the spell: that we must whack the mole of make-believe back into its hole. Don Quixote is a book that asks us not to get immersed in it. It is fiction that asks us to repudiate fiction. Therein lies its modernity. On the face of it, this seems like a self-defeating tactic. Isn’t selfdebunking fiction something like an invitation to stay out of a party? To compensate for the foregone pleasure of immersion in make-believe, it has

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to offer something else, a new pleasure, the thrill of disciplined intellectual detachment—the delicious sob of self-punishment, of ascetic cleansing, of putting away childish things. The payoff for these privations is a sense of social electiveness (rollicking yarns for the mob; an ironic novel for the connoisseur). Yet, we have it from the success of Don Quixote that even the mob was waking up to the sophisticated pleasure of fiction-disbelief. In fact, a great deal of the popular artistic production of the late siglo de oro easily admits to being called an art of disenchantment. Lope de Vega, Calderón, Baltasar de Alcázar, Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo—all the great writers of the period delight in dismantling the fictiveness of their fictional worlds, methodically bearing the cranks and cogs of literary manufacture. This vogue is epitomized by Lope de Vega’s “Soneto de Repente” (c. 1610) whose subject is the writing of that selfsame sonnet. Velázquez mined the same seam in his painting of Las Meninas (1656)—dubbed the quintessence of Spanish art and of early modernity—which features the painter painting Las Meninas. The presence of a giant mirror is implied on the hither side of the canvas, a mirror in which representation represents itself and thereby dispels some of its own magic. Witty, cerebral, sophisticated, complex: yet under these orchids of modernity there lies the rock of puritanical reproach. Self-reflectivity is a warning against image and fiction, urging us to beware the sympathetic appeal of artistic works, to dissect, to eviscerate wonder. Spanish selfreflectivity is part of a culture that includes Dominican flagellants, Catholic penitence, and the moral paranoia of Philip II’s monarchy. In Calderón’s Life Is a Dream (a dream of which we are disabused even as we dream it) and Zurbarán’s monastic pictures is the same instinct to atone and disenchant. This asceticism also threads through Cervantes’s deconstruction of the conceits of fiction, of which the physical punishment meted on Quixote is a vivid expression. Don Quixote is a violent book—a compendium of cruelties, Vladimir Nabokov said;12 but its cruelty is really self-directed. Its fiction is out to curb and punish itself, and its reader must adjust to the delicious cilice of renunciation: chastise your enthusiasm, nip make-believe in the bud. This mental self-control, too, is part of the ethos of modernity.

The weakness of language The path of explanation thus far is a well-trodden one. Don Quixote demystifies fiction; hence, it demystifies itself, and this self-demystification, this flirtation with self-negation, is modern—modern as opposed to candid, unalloyed, and pretenseless. Thus, modernity likes to think, though the duality rests on an unexamined assumption—the assumption that there ever was a naive, unreflective way of consuming fiction that was superannuated by modern, mature, skeptical art. Cervantes’s novel will have us know that

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Quixote is the victim of a hopelessly naive and single-minded way of reading fiction. But is it true? Is that how fiction is and was ever read? If it is not, as I propose to show, it may follow that the máquina Cervantes purports to dismantle is really a straw man and that modernity, which is said to have replaced that old-fashioned máquina, rests on a fantasy—the fantasy of a new sophistication. To illustrate this claim, let us open Don Quixote. *

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Therein we follow the adventures of a fiction-addled fool who sees giants in windmills, armies in pig herds, castles in country inns, a white-fingered lady in a farm wench, and a helmet in a basin. Cervantes plies the clownery of Quixote’s monomania for all it is worth (about 800 pages). But the novelist is also intrigued by the ways in which the mind tells lies to itself; he marvels at the power of normal self-delusion that comes with inhabiting a cultural or linguistic niche—what the philosopher would call, a language game. Read the same stories (or the same op-ed pieces and news websites) time and again, and their patterns, their mantras, their jargons, and their clichés weave into the fabric of your reality. Indeed, it becomes reality, which you forget is made of words and pictures and ideas. This is the condition in which we find Quixote, the “unfortunate gentleman who believe in all those inventions and lies simply because they are in the same style and manner as his foolish books” (DQ, 257). If something sounds like the accepted description of reality, then it is real. Quixote, we might say, is an inmate of language. But sane (or less insane) people are no less bewitched than him. We are told about Sancho and his kin that their minds are hamstrung in clichés and folksy sayings. “Everyone in the Panza family was born with a sack of proverbs inside” (DQ, 744). Quixote flies at Sancho for speaking in readymade phrases. “Damn you, Sancho, where will you stop? When you begin to string together proverbs and stories, nobody can endure it,” Quixote cries out (it is always other people’s linguistic bewitchment we notice, seldom our own) (DQ, 379). And elsewhere, “as I have said so often, will the day ever come when I see you speak an ordinary coherent sentence without any proverbs?” (DQ, 686). Well might he speak. He is the man who lives life as if it were a chivalric tale, the man who is a symbol for the idea that language speaks us, and not we language. Today we would say Cervantes is interested in ideology—how the Quixotes and Sanchos of the world, indeed everyone high and low, are enchanted by language—formulaic ideas, phraseologies, formulas, sayings; we just can’t seem to quit, like Plato’s cave. Our minds are encased in fictions, and it has been one of the most consistent traits of artistic and literary modernity to remind us of this condition and to spin stories and pictures that have it—our enthrallment to language—for their underlying subject. In fact, we could say

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that artistic modernity is a long meditation on the all-encircling ubiquity of representation. It is the meditation that brings together Cervantes and Romantic subjectivism, the “linguistic turn” of modern philosophy and the obsessively self-knowing art of the twentieth century. When it is said that Don Quixote contains every novel thereafter, what is really meant, I suspect, is that Cervantes’s novel was the first literary artifact dedicated to the allmightiness of language. It is fiction establishing the legend of modernity according to which there is no escaping fiction. This book is about the mystifications of modernity, and this chapter is the place to demystify ourselves of the myth that we are mystified by language. Whereas Don Quixote is usually taken to establish this legend, it strikes me that it is just as well as its debunker—as if, setting up modernity with one hand, it pulled the rug out from under it with the other (so coyly modern that it doesn’t quite buy into the whole modern fable). The legend of the all-encompassing logos (of linguisticism, subjectivism, etc.) rests on a logical contradiction. Briefly put, its doctrine invalidates itself in the expression. Should it be the case that language wraps around our understanding and self-expression, should it be the case that the cave really is all we know, then we would not notice it. To say that we inhabit a linguistic universe is to imagine some place beyond and therefore to assign a nonfictive, non-linguistic limit boundary to it. As soon as we become aware that a particular ideology commandeers our thoughts, that ideology is all-mighty no more. If, therefore, the characters of Don Quixote notice that each is in the thrall of a language game (an ideology, a discourse, a fiction), it is not because language is all-powerful but on the contrary because its spell has begun to dry up. This evaporation has a name—it is, broadly speaking, the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when the monopolistic ideology of medieval Christendom broke up into a marketplace of contending creeds and ways of thinking and being. Where there is no alternative to a worldview, no one feels constricted by it. That we are able to see that Quixote and Sancho are confined by linguistic ecosystems, that we are made to feel the linguistic horizon of which we ourselves are captive mean that we have woken up from the tyranny of wraparound ideology. The situation in Don Quixote is that of people who have begun to notice how they are islanded by separated language games and by the same token disabused of them. Sancho notices that Quixote is the fool of one ideology (romance books), and Quixote notices that Sancho is the fool of another (proverbial wisdom). Both are in the position to realize that ideology is not consubstantial with reality but merely a window onto it. Don Quixote is about our disenchantment from language. It parallels the situation of those Catholics when Protestants came along to tell them that what they believed, and who they had been, was “Catholic.” The violence with which each camp defended its language game (Catholicism on one side, Protestantism on the other) underscores the new fragility of ideology. Each side visited on the other the pangs of

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disenchantment, and the persecution perpetrated on the heretic also aimed to silence the heresy within oneself—the awful realization that one’s religion was but a belief system among others. “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees, which are falsehoods on the other,” Blaise Pascal wrote at the culmination of the hundred-year European war of beliefs ended by Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.13 The remark encapsulates the disenthralled state of the European mind at the dawn of the modern age. The breaking-up of Europe into a marketplace of ideologies (of religions, of political philosophies, of “cultures”) sent ripples through intellectual life. To the thinking person, it recommended an attitude of skepticism, of the sort exemplified by Montaigne’s notion that “we seem to have no standard of truth and reason other than the example and pattern of the opinion and customs of the country we live in.”14 Variations of this skepticism are legion among humanists of the period (Jean Bodin, Richard Hooker, Robert Burton, Justus Lipsius, Paolo Sarpi, and Francis Bacon).15 In fact this skepticism is the attitude the reader of Don Quixote is made to adopt toward the monomania of the man from La Mancha and the rustic obduracy of his squire. The comedy of the novel requires that we watch the believing mind from the standpoint of cosmopolitan detachment. But as this detachment becomes habitual, it infects everything it alights on—including itself. Everywhere it looks, it only sees, as the novel puts it, “hackneyed concepts” (DQ, 709) together with the underlying admission that ideas can become obsolete, that they don’t stick fast to the bedrock of reality, hence that truth is really custom—as one might say, the flavor of the day. The problem with this “truth-is-custom” skepticism is that logically it does not spare itself. The insight into the fictiveness of all ideas and perceptions involves that very insight. Thus, the great pillar of modern (and Modernist) subjectivism—that reality is fiction—undercuts itself. It is a legend—an idea of wide currency, which no one quite believes even as we forget, or pretend to forget, that we don’t believe it. Modernity, it would seem, does not quite believe in itself. There is an episode of Don Quixote that speaks to this point. When is a basin a helmet? This question feeds a practical joke that runs the length of two chapters in Part I. The answer is this: it depends on what people say. If enough folk say that the basin is a helmet, then a helmet it becomes. Except, of course, that the awareness of the concept of truth-by-consensus invalidates it. To say that a basin is a helmet because everyone says so produces an ideological helmet, not an actual one. And an ideological helmet, a fictional helmet, is one that even fantasists like Quixote can only pretend to don. He protests that the basin is a helmet: How can you “presume to say that this is a basin and not the helmet I say it is?” (DQ, 390). But the spell is hereby broken: it is broken by the “I say it is.” In fact, no sooner does he realize that it is for him to say, Quixote wavers, “As for what has been said regarding this being a basin and not a helmet . . ., I do not dare offer a final

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opinion. I leave it to the judgment of your graces . . ., and your minds will be free and able to judge the things in this castle as they really and truly are, and not as they seem to me” (DQ, 392). No one who is genuinely enchanted can speak coolly about the difference between things as they are and things as they seem to oneself. The Quixote who knows he is enchanted (by language, by a sorcerer, by his own generous credulity) is a man who no longer buys into his bewitchment. He who sees himself being captive of an ideology has a foot and a leg outside the prison door. It would therefore seem as though Quixote doesn’t really believe in the long practical joke of which he is supposed to be the brunt—that of a gentleman who “always believed that everything that happened to him had to be adventures and more adventures” (DQ, 559). In a broader sense, we could say that Don Quixote does not subscribe to the legend of modernity, which it otherwise squeezes for every comedic drop, that fiction is the stuff of life and that reality is aesthetic through and through.

Make-Disbelieve In fact, it should be obvious that Quixote’s very resolve to be enchanted come what may hints at his disenchantment. He is more stubborn than credulous. “I know and believe that I am enchanted and that suffices,” he sulks (DQ, 421). But it does not. Quixote’s fervent protest that he is mad argues for his relative sanity. “It is enough for me to think and believe that my good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and virtuous. . . . I imagine that everything I say is true, no more and no less, and I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be” (DQ, 201). Whoever says this is, by the same token, disenchanted. “Mad I am and mad I shall remain until you return with the reply to the letter which I intend to send” (DQ, 194): intentional madness being a selfcontradiction, only a parodic madman can say this—the sort of harlequin Quixote impersonates when, pulling off his breeches and doing cartwheels in shirttails, he humors Sancho’s hackneyed notion of lunacy (DQ, 204). Acting the fool makes one a fool in half. Quixote knows this too. It is he who says, “The most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton” (DQ, 479). Perhaps we should have known that Quixote is too much the articulate expositor of romance fiction—indeed that he knows too well that his own story is being written (especially in Part II)—to really suffer from the mad credulity that sustains Cervantes’s running gag. There are even occasions in the late chapters when our amiable fool confesses to having trumped up his madness. There is mention of an adventure “he is said to have retracted, saying he had invented it because he thought it was consonant and compatible with the adventures he had read in his histories” (DQ, 614). Is Quixote a fiction-victim or a cynical fabulist?

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The answer, as always, is complicated. It is in the nature of fiction that we do not believe in it. Indeed its very enjoyment implies disbelief. As such, fiction is the enjoyment of cynicism—the constitutive insincerity displayed by Quixote when he says, for instance, “I am in love, simply because it is obligatory for knights errant to be so” (DQ, 666). We would doubt the commitment of a man whose marriage vows rest on the remark that men in his situation customarily make marriage vows. So it is of Quixote’s commitment to knight errantry. It is something he performs, not something he is. The novel he lives in, as a result, does not celebrate the power of fiction but its inherent weakness—the inability for art to constitute the substance of reality, to, as the Modernist would someday say, aestheticize reality. No doubt, the realization that we cannot believe in make-believe is mournful enough; perhaps it is half the mournfulness of Quixote’s woeful countenance. If only I could still believe, his melancholy face seems to say. There is a desperate drive in him to take refuge in the enchanted kingdom of a wraparound ideology. Once he has clowned himself out of knightly romance delusion, he switches genres and sets his mind on becoming the placid shepherd hero of a pastoral (II, 67). Quixote hops from one fictional island to another as if to escape the historical tide of disenchantment. He is the clown who weeps that the circus had to close down, the child forced to put away childish things. Sometimes we can practically feel Cervantes ruing the fact he can no longer inhabit the spontaneous credulity he makes fun of. Things seemed so much simpler and more sincere in the age of ideology triumphant when one system of thought was supreme, and therefore undetectable. Surely it would never have occurred to anyone then to call it a fiction. Not so Don Quixote which, by putting fiction front and center, awakens the genie of disbelief. But the mournful realization of this most comic and sad of books remains that fiction works only among the disenchanted. *

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This is not to deny that enchantment is part of the pleasure of fiction. Pity the reader who cannot in some fashion visualize a scene in his mind’s eye. We are all, so far as we enjoy a good yarn, Quixote-like: words on the page morph into giants, castles, and enchanted forests. This probably is the suspension of disbelief Samuel Coleridge talked about. Yet notice that for suspension to take place, it must be willed; the mind does not suspend some of its perceptual and rational faculties without in some fashion noticing it. This goes for Quixote too who, though the most immersed and beguiled of readers, is nevertheless aware of the mechanics of fiction-belief. In fact, he spends as much time succumbing to fiction as discussing its psychological workings. He explains that it behooves an “intelligent man . . . to read these books and thereby . . . see the pleasure to be had from them” (DQ, 428).

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What pleasure is it? “The joy,” he continues, “of seeing before our very eyes a great lake of boiling pitch, and in it, swimming and writhing about, there are so many serpents, lizards, and many other kinds of fierce and fearsome creatures, and from the middle of the lake there comes an extremely sad voice, saying: ‘Thou, O knight, whosoever thou mayest be’” (DQ, 428). The man who says this is logically not immersed in the waters of credulity. He watches himself watching the make-believe lake. He is a spectator to his own consented bewitchment. He entertains fiction (he holds it in external tenure), and this is why he is entertained by it. We could say that the entire narrative setup of Don Quixote is designed to bracket off fiction from life—that is, to put it in a box, to neutralize it, to rationalize art by exhibiting its workings. Always Cervantes’s reader has to keep four layers of awareness distinct even as he weaves them into one story: what happens in La Mancha (a horseman charges into windmills); what the horseman thinks is happening (battling giants); what his squire sees (a horseman who thinks he is a knight is charging into windmills which he believes to be giants); what the reader apprehends (a squire seeing that his master believes he is battling giants when he is in fact hurtling into windmills). These four layers involve a fact, the misapprehension of this fact, the apprehension of the misapprehension of this fact, and finally the apprehension of the apprehension of the misapprehension of this fact. The misapprehension of a fact is delusion. The apprehension of the misapprehension of that fact, which thence becomes a willful conscious misapprehension, is what we know as fiction. It is the fundamental subject of Don Quixote. Fiction makes things up, to be sure, but does not lie. For unlike a lie, fiction wants us to know that its stuff is made up. Following fiction therefore requires a contradictory state of mind—that of skeptical hallucination. It is perhaps the case that before the age of four or five, a human being is spared in this contradiction. Like Quixote seems to do (but really doesn’t), a young child takes fictions in dead earnest. This actually means that young children are unable to enjoy fiction. They who subscribe uncritically to belief—they drown in the boiling lake and cannot entertain fiction. Quixote is not among them. Fictions are beliefs we delight in not believing. Disbelief is a juggling act because, as the word implies, it assumes belief. One half of us believes; the other half reminds us not to believe. In his famous explanation of why a theater audience thrills at happenings they know not to be true, Aristotle suggests a mind-split between emotion and intellection: we give emotional credence to that from which we withhold intellectual credence. Our emotional brain tells us to go for it (our heart goes pitter-a-patter when the two lovers kiss on screen, or it drops into the cold pit of our stomach when the green monster sloshes out of the lagoon), while the rational brain (which stands by the boiling lake while the other half drowns in it) knows it isn’t so. The cognitive dissonance between the two brains, the ambivalence,

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the inability to weld one with the other—that is fiction: a thing which, as Quixote says, “it is not easy to be positive about.” This particular remark comes in response to someone’s objection that the Lady Dulcinea has never walked the earth except in Quixote’s imagination. Here is what he replies, “A great deal could be said in answer to that. God knows whether a Dulcinea exists in the world or not, or whether she is a mere figment of the imagination or something else. These are things that it is not so easy to be positive about” (DQ, 672). Quixote neither rejects nor accepts the objection. To reject it would make him a raving madman; to accept it, as his interlocutor intends, would make him fiction-deaf. He is not the victim of hallucinations; rather he entertains them in his imagination. This doesn’t stop him from thrilling at them (the thought that Dulcinea might not exist doesn’t stop his devotion to her). “Tell me,” he asks about one of his adventures, “was my account of what happened to me in the Cave of Montesinos the truth or a dream?” (DQ, 870). “There is much to say,” comes the answer, “for it has something of both.” And there Quixote remains. His mind is such that it can tolerate this ambivalence, which is good, because this ambivalence is fiction, and he is its chevalier servant. Fiction is mentalism and its denial. It consists of knowing that a mild version of solipsism is inescapable and a strong version of it, untenable. “It is as true that they are donkeys as it is that I am Don Quixote and you Sancho Panza; at least, that is what they seem to be” (DQ, 517). The remarkable thing here is not the doctrine of philosophical subjectivism (esse est percipi); it is that Quixote expounds it and that the very exposition of it destroys the premise of his being caught up in it. “Reality is my perception” is the dictum of unanalyzed madness; “reality is my perception when I choose” is the dictum of fiction. It impedes unreflective sincerity. Consider also this Moebius band of a sentence: “This was the first day [Quixote] really knew and believed he was a true knight errant and not a fantastic one, for he saw himself treated in the same manner in which, he had read, knights were treated in past ages” (DQ, 658). It starts by implying that Quixote had been faking it: he never totally believed the windmills were giants or pigs were soldiers or the scullery maid was Dulcinea. Now, on the contrary, Quixote is a true believer: “This was the first day he really knew and believed.” Yet how does he now know he is not a fantastic knight errant but a true one? Because what is happening to him conforms to the stories he has read (“he saw himself treated in the same manner in which, he had read, knights were treated”). He believes he’s a real knight because everything happens to him as to one of those fictional knights he has read about: now, since to read fiction is to be a spectator, as Quixote well knows, the conclusion imposes itself that Quixote is in fact spectator to his belief he is a real knight. Taken as a whole, the sentence cycles from disbelief to belief back to disbelief again in one short breath. This cycling is dizzying enough, though in truth it is the juggling act of any mind entertaining fiction.

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The castle in Spain of metafiction What do I mean to establish by this lengthy tour through the engine room of fiction? Simply this, that, notwithstanding its stated intent to dismantle the machine of fiction, Don Quixote does no such thing. The notion that it inaugurates a more sophisticated kind of fiction, one that put paid to a certain immersive thrill in fiction and ushered the more refined joy of skeptical self-consciousness—all this is literary legend, a strand of the mythology of modernity. The reason is that fiction is inherently skeptical. Don Quixote is neither a comic elegy to a certain gullible, childlike way of reading fiction, nor a wake-up call to shake us out of that formless dream. Cervantes’s novel truly is subversive: not because it subverts fiction but because it subverts the modern legend according to which metafiction subverts fiction. In truth, the sort of fiction that remarks on its fictiveness and supposedly undermines make-believe adds or subtracts nothing vis-à-vis fiction. Cervantes does nothing especially radical when he hobbles his own narrative, calls some of its episodes “apocryphal,” points to gaps and hiccups, and yanks us out of La Mancha to have us stare at the printed page. The reason is that disbelief isn’t the spoilsport of fiction but its very essence. Cervantine metafiction does not revolutionize fiction; it is fiction plain (but not simple). “Once upon a time,” begins the storyteller and at once the audience’s credulity is on high alert. The enchantment of disenchantment (i.e., techniques of narrative distancing) is inherent in storytelling. A story is never a fact but its presentation: we are no less aware of this than that a meal is the result of cooking. At most, Don Quixote highlights the mechanics of just how cooked (and overcooked) fiction is. Its novelty is to point out the obvious, not to improve on it. Not even an author of chivalric romances like Ariosto is completely at one with his characters and plot, and the sixteenthcentury reader of such stories was no four-year-old child; he appreciated that the miraculous narrative coincidences and reversals happen only in fiction. People then enjoyed fiction as we do now: for the legerdemain of it. It is a spurious distinction which divides gullible reading from meta-reading, the low-brow public of gullible readers (the petty proletariat and peasantry of inn courts, “the presumptuous mob who tend to be the ones who read those books . . . and want them,” DQ, 415) from the supposedly refined, self-reflective high-brow readership of “literary” fiction. Don Quixote itself proves it: its success across all social strata shows that even the reading and listening public of drinking houses was alive to the thrill of dissociation. What Don Quixote did is stress that we like nothing better than not to believe what we read. We are every bit Sancho Panza riding in tow: we don’t believe a word of Don Quixote, but we go along. Indeed, we go along because we don’t believe the enchantment. Adding disenchantment to the mix is supererogatory. If the modern novel is that disenchantment, then

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the modern novel never really happened. Otherwise put, Cervantes did not invent the modern novel because it didn’t need inventing. Here is an example of how, though it appears to undo fiction, Don Quixote leaves everything as it is. In this episode, Quixote wonders what inspired Sancho to think up the moniker Knight of the Sorrowful Face to nickname his master. Sancho answers that he was inspired by Quixote’s face. But Quixote isn’t satisfied; the real reason, he says, is that the wise man whose task it will be to write the history of my deeds must have thought it would be a good idea if I took some appellative title as did the knights of the past . . . and must have put on your tongue and in your thoughts the idea of calling me The Knight of the Sorrowful Face. (DQ, 139) In his zeal to tear down the máquina of naive fiction, it seems as though Cervantes tears down his own fiction: it is quite impossible for a chronicler of the future to put thoughts now into Sancho’s head. But tearing down one’s own fiction can have a paradoxical effect. It can end up confirming fiction. Thus, in this particular scene, Sancho cannot logically entertain today the thoughts that will be lent to him tomorrow unless there is no tomorrow. And there is no tomorrow because he exists in the omniscient “now” of fiction. In which case, Sancho lives only on the page. Hence nothing has changed. Cervantes’s act of sabotage—the fiction that purports to dismantle fictiveness—lands us back where we started from—that is, in plain oldfashioned fiction.

The subservience of fiction Now, if Don Quixote does not “undo” fiction and if it is not modern in that sense, may it be Postmodern in the sense that it shows fiction to be inescapable, ubiquitous, and constitutive of human reality? It will be pointed out on this score that Cervantes’s novel was born of a baroque culture that was absolutely mesmerized by illusion—la vida es sueño, we are the stuff that dreams are made of, and so on.16 Don Quixote seems like a typical product of baroque illusionism that proclaims fiction unlimited (in Postmodern lingo, “the reign of the simulacrum”). In fact, this is all wrong. First, for the structural reason that the distinction between fact and fiction is constitutive of fiction. An image cannot blur the border between itself and the world without erasing itself out of existence. It is no use papering over this fact by moving the goalpost of subjectivism, such as a recent book on Don Quixote does when it explains that “fiction is not a picture of the world; it is a picture of how we, and others, picture the world.”17 This is meant to impart that, since we take part in a collective

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way of picturing the world, we effectively live in fiction. But this is faulty logic. In practice, a way of picturing the world manifests itself in pictures. Therefore, pace the statement above, fiction is a picture of the world. Now if it is a picture of the world, there is something it pictures and therefore something to which it stands opposite. Fiction is never self-establishing. As we have seen above, make-believe is penetrated by the awareness of its fictiveness; it can never close the door behind itself and therefore is never triumphant. It is a minor discourse beholden to a master principle—reality. Cervantes’s novel serves the constant reminder that fiction is subservient. It is a painful and painstaking piece of fiction-humbling. Its constant warning is that the world doesn’t play by our ways of picturing it, that a picture is of something. As such, it runs on an invigorated sense of reality. If Don Quixote is a product of the baroque, then it is time to rethink the baroque as not a time of unchecked illusionism (a prelude to our modern and Postmodern constructivism) but a time of checked, defanged, demystified fiction. After all, the seventeenth century isn’t the start of a neo-religious, mystical age but the dawn of a rational one. It sees the first tangible advancements of scientific rationalism in knowledge and society.18 It is the age of Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Torricelli, Huygens, and Newton. From which we could surmise that the baroque luxuriated in fantasies because its society was disenchanting and rationalizing itself. As a point of fact, the word “reality” came into common usage in European languages between 1550 and 1600 just when human endeavors were beginning to accept the existence of a common bedrock of objective reality. The first recorded use of “realidad” comes within two years of the publication of Don Quixote. A culture truly given to simulacrum (i.e., one floating free of reference to a non-illusory world) would have no use for this word. Where there is no reality to travesty or misrepresent, what good is any reference to it? “Reality” was born of the mindset of make-believe, this is true, but for the purpose of asserting the light of reality over the night of unrestrained subjectivism. We could say that the idea of reality never became so pressing to the European mind until it realized just how caught up in subjective perspectives human beings are. “Reality” is the by-product of a mind frightened by its powers of selfbewitchment. The culture, ascendance, and mystique of fiction (the subjects of Don Quixote) are sprung of the rationalization of Western society. When magic thinking prevailed, when miracles and faith-healing and elves and spirits stalked the land, there was no need to champion or arrange a special arena for fiction. The rise of art, indeed the whole industry of art, is predicated on the split between a serious, rule-bound, rational world (which oversees the management of wealth, health, science, and politics) and the playful world. This playful world includes not only art, of course, but also religion (which over the next centuries also gets relegated to a category of its own away from the levers of power), moral intuitions, and the private rituals

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that govern personal ethics and relationships. It is true that, to the thinking person at any rate, this side of reality that comprises social customs and beliefs came to seem a shadow play, a fiction, something which we know to be true only within certain rules of the social game, a game that is played one way on this side of the Pyrenees, and another way on the thither side. Yet, this insight into the fictiveness of customary beliefs and mores actually rests on the discovery of a non-fictive world of hard facts and rules and regularities set by nature, mathematics, logic, and reason. And the purpose of formulating the insight into the fictiveness of society is not to indulge it but to discipline that fictiveness and watch that we do not succumb to it. There is no denying that the divide between the objective rational world of scientific management and the soft playful world of human meaning produced a schizoid split. It is the everyday cognitive dissonance which, for example, makes a religious believer say that everything is in God’s hands even as he seeks hands-on medical expertise to unblock his cardiac artery. One could accuse this man of playing at religion. This is no easy revelation. An outed religious ironist, a society that realizes it is only pretending, will often scramble back into the den of the old earnestness. Fanatic assertion of one-mindedness returns with a vengeance. Hell hath no fury like a shaky conviction: witness the wars of religion that ravaged the European continent because its societies had begun to think rationally about belief, religion, and the construction of ideas in general. These horrific wars show that no price was high enough to dull the pain of a split consciousness, that it was better to die a convinced man than live as an ironic one. Religious fanaticism gives reason to doubt Mark Twain’s pronouncement that “faith is believing what you know ain’t true.” It is very well for the philosophical skeptic to say that (e.g., Montaigne); it is harder for the watchful believer to weigh it (e.g., Pascal). However, a society as a whole cannot sustainably be ironic about fundamental beliefs. Individual rights may be an imagined construct, but if the police illegally taps my phone I will exercise my rights with most unironic indignation. Single-minded conviction returns with a vengeance. Still, the insight that all beliefs and values are imaginary constructs lingers in the background. How to manage this cognitive disconnect? Rationalized society opted to cordon it off, arranged a special realm for it where it is safe, restorative, salvific, fun, and sophisticated to be disenchanted and whet the razor’s edge of conscious irony. The modern mind invented “art.” This is where we find the baroque, that is, the birthplace of the West’s love affair with art and fiction. From a distance the invention of art may look like the triumph of illusion (“the baroque”); in reality, the baroque set up a gilded cage—the palace-prison in which art finds itself to this day. *

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Don Quixote is one of its first inmates. Its eponym is a man of both fanatical belief and disconcerting cynicism, a man who knows he is a spectator to his own life. He personifies a double consciousness that would be unendurable in everyday existence. He passionately believes what he knows ain’t true. That is his madness, and it is the ordinary madness of anyone living in the uncomfortable new world of scientific realism. Quixote is our prophylactic: he does for us all the time what we can do for ourselves only in short contained bursts: walk the psychic tightrope of split consciousness. Our calamitous madness is set into a safe comedic cameo. There we can handle it. Don Quixote’s exuberant indulgence of fiction, its pushing the formulas into metafiction, its philosophic fictionality—all these actually pay a roundabout compliment to the historical ascendance of the reality principle. They assume the jurisdiction of the rule-bound, fact-based Spain under Philip II who turned the kingdom into a bureaucracy and grandees into tax collectors. Quixote’s nostalgia for the magical world of spellbound knights and enchanters merely confirms the passing away of this world. Indeed, Don Quixote needs it to be dead, for if society were to give in to dreams, this novel would have no reason for being. Quixote’s fantasy works very well so long as there is a non-imaginary level-headed reality to offset his imaginary life. Take away this realist background and Quixote collapses. Proof is in the last chapters: there, society has grown so besotted by Quixote’s fictive escapism that it embraces it. People arrange puppet shows, masques, and theatricals to abet his adventures. Village lassies dress like shepherdesses. Courtiers and villagers act as if they are in a chivalric romance or a pastoral novel (DQ, 914). The separation between fiction and life seems to melt away. “I’m the comical fellow and the squire,” says Sancho, “and this gentleman is my master, the historied Don Quixote de la Mancha” (DQ, 838). He adds that “before long there won’t be a tavern, an inn, a hostelry, or a barbershop where the history of our deed isn’t painted” (DQ, 923). Quixote has become the make-believe knight he wanted to be. His work (“you have the attribute of turning everyone who deals with you or talks to you into madmen and fools,” DQ, 867) is complete: fiction swallows up reality. Only, what happens? In the breakdown of the duality between fiction and reality, he does not thrive. He did well so long as reality was plain and dull and hard. When the world becomes make-believe, when people go along with his fantasy and grandiosity, then his quixotism (i.e., to keep up the charge of enchantment) withers away. How can he charge on the steed of fiction when fiction is everywhere? He has nowhere to go. The enemy of fiction is not reality. It is faith—by which I mean the situation in which the mind weaves a reality so pervasive it is no longer seen as a construction. The demise of fiction would be, for instance, the world hypothesized by post-Modernists, of triumphant and universal fictiveness where dream and reality, word and thing meld into one. Quixote would

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have none of it. He is never more incensed than on the occasion of a pastoral masque of “feigned shepherdesses”: he leaves it “with great fury and signs of anger” (DQ, 840). Where fiction is all-encompassing, there is nothing for the knight of fiction to do: Quixote dies. He dies reminding his friends that always they should mind the separation between reality and fiction, for when that separation fades, fiction fades. Fiction is quixotic, or it is not at all. Art is a minor discourse. Its subservience is the reason why it has a place to call home in modern society. This conclusion flies in the face of the modern legend of art triumphant— that all is fiction, and fiction is the fabric and lifeblood of existence. Don Quixote demystifies this legend. It is not the catalyst of modernity but its regulator. This is what makes it so central to the modern mind.

Three ways to undo fiction To say that fiction is quixotic means that it is always thwarted (humbled, checked, disciplined) by reality. Always those windmills will defeat the giant-slayer. But fiction is quixotic (a minor discourse) also because it can never make common cause with its master. Never can the giant-slayer join the windmills. This “joining the windmills” makes up part of the legend of modernity of which Don Quixote is an early herald. When we read in the first sentence that Quixote is “one of those gentlemen who has a lance and a shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing” and that “an occasional stew, eggs and abstinence on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, sometimes the treat of squab on Sundays consumed three-fourths of his income” (DQ, 19), we are squarely into a type of fiction that would someday be called realistic—reportage on the sociological bread-and-butter facts of life. Cervantes does not break new grounds here, the picaresque novels of the sixteenth century having already dug their spade deep into the dirt of Spanish everyday life. His opening paragraph follows in these picaresque steps: the first sentence has him squarely in the role of historian. Quixote is “one of those gentlemen” defined by historical vagaries of time, geography, and economics. Herein, one supposes, is another reason for calling Don Quixote “modern”: it shuns the rose pastels of otherworldly idealism in favor of the rough charcoal of telling it like it is. It is modern also because its picaresque is militant; it chides the lofty pretensions of high culture. Its repeated conceit, after all, is to send an extravagantly literate man crashing time and again against plain hard-edged reality. Reality prevails at every encounter; and at every encounter the dreamer gets his humbling ration of blows. But does reality really prevail? The problem, as Postmodern critics have been pointing out, is that reality in literature is realism, and realism is a rhetorical effect—“l’effet de réel,” to quote Roland Barthes. Realism exists

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only within a text. As such, and like all forms of realism, Don Quixote is a pointless mutiny: you don’t get out of fiction by means of fiction. It is like trying to empty a library by bringing more books into it. The whole realist tendency of the novel that comes to light in the sixteenth-century picaresque and prevails from 1730 to 1900, roughly from Defoe to Zola and Hardy, retails the pipe dream that literature offers a road to reality. No matter how often, and in however many guises, the realist author writes that his hero is one of the recognizable social types who eat stew on Thursdays and play golf on Sundays, that hero is no less fictional than the Lancelot and Amadís of Gaul of yestertime. It may be that Cervantes was aware of the artificiality of realism. This may be why he decided not to dismantle the máquina of idealist fiction by writing a bluntly, crudely picaresque novel. Instead he took the tack of emphasizing the makeshift of fiction. This move anticipated the dialectic which transformed realist art into Modernist art when, round about 1900, writers realized that never does realist art cease to be art. Still craving for realness and authenticity, artists decided to dismantle fictiveness by exposing its riggings. Here, said the self-declared contriver of fiction (Joyce, Pirandello, Pynchon, Sarraute, etc.), are the wires, struts, props, and pulleys that run the stage show. It was about turning giants back into windmills, about literature baring what it is made of, about art getting real. Yet, the Modernist and post-Modernist de-fictionalization of art failed— as Don Quixote predicted it should, having tried itself and come up a cropper. Consider Part II of the novel Don Quixote. Ten years after the publication of the roaringly successful Part I (which left him as penniless as ever), Cervantes called his knight out of retirement to launch into new adventures. The intervening period had made Quixote a very popular figure, and his new adventures had grown totally conscious of their “adventurousness”—what Cervantes calls, their quixocity: “Let’s have more quixoticies: let Don Quixote go charging and Sancho Panza keep talking” (DQ, 482). This is the spirit in which Quixote says, “I embark on another adventure” (DQ, 503). It is a Quixote who knows he is the hero of Part I of Don Quixote by one Miguel de Cervantes. In one sense, the self-consciousness is a realist strategy, that is, it serves an anti-fictional purpose: if Quixote can talk objectively about the narrative that relates his adventures, it must mean that he, unlike romance knights, is a real person who lives in the same world we and Cervantes inhabit. He eats lentils on Fridays, which is more than Amadís of Gaul ever could. For Amadís had no clue he was a fictional knight. This, however, does not follow at all. The Quixote who says he is embarking on an adventure to give something for Part II to go on is already in Part II. The attempt to carve out the reality of Part II is contained in the fictive world of Part II. Fictiveness underpins the dismantling of this fictiveness from within. A piece of art that emphasizes its artfulness is not one

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jot less artificial for it. This doesn’t stop Cervantes from trying—thus setting modern art on its legendary quest: how to overcome art, overthrow its welloiled machine, and make it real. Why it should occur to artists to want to overcome art at this historical stage is interesting. It seems to uncover a well of self-doubt, perhaps even self-hate, in the modern artistic psyche: Why want to overcome art indeed? Why want to overcome art so soon after establishing a special kingdom for it? Perhaps it has to do with the late Renaissance creator realizing he has locked himself up in a gilded prison, the playpen of a marginal discourse. In the flayed, pathetic figure of Quixote (the fool who would be a real knight), the intelligentsia pours the scorn and contempt it feels over its own frivolity, its aestheticness, and its lack of purchase on the stuff that matters. The scribe realizes he cannot write his way out of the scriptorium. His charging at the walls of his cell is half the drama of modern art. It certainly is the drama of the art that gives a first glimmer of itself in Don Quixote, and which calls itself anti-art. No anti-art, whether anti-novel, anti-theater, anti-poetry, and so on, has ever broken the walls of fiction. Its antinomism is wishful thinking whether “anti” is taken to mean “opposed to” or “instead of.” If the anti-novel is there in place of the novel, then there should be no point in calling it a novel. Why enshrine the supposedly superseded form in its name—unless of course it has not been one bit superseded? If, on the other hand, “anti” means that the novelist wages war against the novel, the name suggests that the battle is never won. The novel comes out looking invincible. One can plausibly hate what one is. But it is illogical to manifest this hatred by persisting in what one is—unless one actually likes oneself the way one is. The only truly effective way of opposing the novel would be not to write one. This, of course, is self-defeating: Who ever heard of a nonexistent work of art revolutionizing art? Next to the quixotic legend of anti-art, of which Don Quixote is the mainspring, is the legend that self-reflective art or metafiction produces a more critical, canny, sophisticated read. Italo Calvino claimed that metafiction remedies our “invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence.”19 The idea here is that we supposedly exercise greater control over our experience when we are aware that its object is “art.” But is it really so? For it to be true, it would have to be demonstrated that a reader who is aware of being a reader is less dependent on the text. This is dubious. I do not skip the writer’s sentences and interactively substitute my own just because I have acute awareness of reading a fictional artifact. Indeed, metafiction merely rearranges the furniture. I am no less bound to the author’s open toying with the plot as I would be to his serving the plot straight and tidy. In either case, the game is fixed (which is just as the reader wants it). A truly interactive novel would be one that contains swaths of blank pages for the reader to fill in. This, so far, is a story no one is interested in reading because fiction is partly the desire to be led on.

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This is not to dispute that Cervantes may have in some fashion wanted to free the reader from the infantile need for subjugation (derribar la máquina, etc.). As a point of fact, we cannot read Don Quixote as we do, say, The Song of Roland. “Pay me what you owe me, and leave off your stories and chivalries,” says the down-to-earth innkeeper to confabulating Quixote (DQ, 121), kindly asking enchantment to take its stories elsewhere. But what of the story that asks us to forego stories? Just how detached are we from the metafiction of Don Quixote? Just how much can we escape the enchantment of its disenchantment? Judging by its popularity, very little. The disenchanted prose of the anti-novel weaves an enchanting world of its own. After all, Quixote, in his madness, thinks his duty is to disenchant Dulcinea of the sorcerer that has her believe she is a peasant wench. In his enchantment Quixote thinks he is a disenchanter. So does Don Quixote—a tale of disenchantment as enchanting as ever was written. *

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There was yet another legendary path for modern art to derribar la máquina, that is, destroy its artfulness. Cervantes also pioneered this road three centuries ahead of the Modernist avant-garde: it consists of constructing as poor a machine, as glitch-ridden and shambling and ill-assembled a product as possible: a work of art that flaunts its ineptitude, its makeshiftness and thereby, it is supposed, bears proof of authenticity. Cervantes avows his authorial incompetence from the start: “Idle reader, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most elegant, and the cleverest that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order which has it that like begets like” (DQ, 3). He declares himself unfit to patch together the many, sometimes contradictory textual strands of Quixote’s adventures. There are “missing parts” (DQ, 65) never to be found, an episode that stops in midcourse, inconsistencies, all manners of narrative crossed wires, and what’s more, Cervantes does nothing to hide them. “I do not wish to go along with the common custom and implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to forgive or ignore the faults you may find in this my child” (DQ, 3). Overlook not the glitches, Cervantes says. “My incompetence and lack of learning” are real (DQ, 5), and my tale as rickety as they come. Of course it is preemptive modesty—the commoner presenting, cap in hand, his work to the lord of the manor; it is fully within the then elaborate codes of courtesy. But it is also emphatic; it is part of the novel’s program: after all, one does not derribar a machine without making a mess. This affectation of rough work, as I have said, gets resuscitated circa 1890, first with Gauguin, the Fauvists, and then, in full-throated mode, with the Modernist avant-garde which makes it a point of honor to paint or

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sculpt or versify badly—drawing our attention to the artwork’s lack of finish and finesse. Nevertheless, there’s cause to doubt that this form of fictionsabotage is any more successful than the previous ones. The reason is that an intentional flaw is a flaw no more. The adventure that gets interrupted in mid-flow is not incomplete or at loose ends; it rounds up exactly where Cervantes means it to end. “The delectable history stopped and was interrupted, without the author giving us any information as to where the missing parts could be found” (DQ, 65). In fact, there are no missing parts, no bits that Cervantes has removed or omitted. Though he blames the careless “Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian” (DQ, 67) and his bungling Spanish translator, it is clear, since there exist no such original author and translator of the adventures of Quixote, that the patchiness is intended. The makeshift is spurious. Don Quixote is not the imperfect gloss of a bad Spanish translation of a somewhat dubious Arabic-written story. There has been no decline from the original to the derivative, from the true to the approximate, from the pristine to the adulterated. Cervantes was in full possession of everything there was to write about Quixote’s adventures, and Don Quixote is the only perfectly finished product there ever was. This takes us to the next legend of modern art, one which in 1600 had a rich future ahead: the legend of artistic unfinishedness. *

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I have demonstrated above that the concept of a deliberate fragment is nonsensical. But art is not deterred by nonsense, and the idea of the work of art-as-fragment has been championed since the nursery period of modernity. In any case, it is during the mannerist period that artists’ sketches and impromptus start catching the eye of collectors. Several things about the artistic fragment exercises fascination: it seems to give a glimpse into the artista’s soul, his process, the inner churnings of his art; it also seems to be more spontaneous, truer-to-life, freer than the polished product. This idea becomes a creed in the late eighteenth century and triumphs in the twentieth when it is boldly declared (here in the words of the American Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman, c. 1950) that “the idea of a ‘finished’ picture is a fiction.”20 There is no such thing as a finished work of art: this is the notso-distant child of Don Quixote’s gleefully vaunted “missing parts.” That we moderns enjoy the conceit of unfinishedness is obvious enough (we will explore the reasons in Chapter 7); nevertheless, this enjoyment is founded on a legend—a piece of attractive but faulty thinking that misconstrues the nature of the material in question, that is, fiction. The idea of a finished picture is in fact not a fiction at all: it is the very idea of fiction; it is, I suspect, one of the raisons d’être of art, which is to create a monad, a piece of completeness in a world that is all open doors and endless vistas. An image, a fiction, a piece of music does and says and plays out everything

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that is meant to occur in it. The half of the story that is not written, the coda of the symphony that is not composed, Mona Lisa’s legs—that which is not included in the work of art simply does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist. It cannot make the artwork seem incomplete. An image is everything life denies: completeness, which we mortals can only sample as a representation, and never in reality. Cervantes—to go back to him—could not leave any “missing parts” out of his novel even if he wanted to. Don Quixote comprises all that there ever was to its story: its lifespan is its whole universe; indeed a work of art does not occur in a universe; it fills out its universe as nothing else (except the fiction we call “God”) does. Divine stuff indeed. The moral to be drawn here is that a piece of art can never be deliberately incomplete: incompletion has to come from external circumstances (the artist dies, the patron’s check bounces, the museum council withdraws an invitation, etc.). The unfinished cannot bestow itself. Anti-art, imperfect-art, bad-art, art-against-art are merely names of this impotent claim. If Don Quixote were a faulty, unfinished novel it wouldn’t be because it says so but because the vicissitudes of life and talent made it thus. *

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Don Quixote is of course every bit as successful a piece of fiction as its admirers will vouch. Nevertheless its three assaults on fiction—to wit, realism, self-reflectivity, and self-professed incompletion—do not dismantle the machine of fiction. Like many similar attempts to come, its leap out of fiction lands into fiction as artistically hidebound as ever. Perhaps this failed overcoming could have been predicted by the fact that Don Quixote is a novel, by which I mean that it was from the start a specimen of the literary genre that made it a business to shake literature out of its dogmatic slumbers. The little new thing, the novella, arose as the poor wayward cousin of the family. The novel was lesser than religious oratory, epic, poetry, or drama. This inferiority made it pugnacious and self-conscious about tradition. It was to be expected that it soon would direct this self-consciousness inward. Hence Don Quixote: an early novel and already an anti-novel. This contrarian zeal is not a superadded quality; it is built into the principle of being a novel. One might say that the novel brings out the double-consciousness inherent in fiction—its drive to posit and its drive to doubt. Don Quixote goes after the chivalric máquina in the sixteenth century; in the seventeenth, Charles Sorel deconstructs pastoral fiction with The Wayward Shepherd; in the eighteenth, Sterne dismantles the novel of education with Tristam Shandy; Flaubert flogs the Romantic novel to death in the mid-1850s; then the generation of 1910 takes the hammer to the realist novel. Meanwhile the novel remains. It remains because it is the expression of artistic consciousness—and this self-reflexivity,

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notwithstanding a modern legend, isn’t extraneous to representation. It is representation. Thus Pierre Corneille was mistaken to assume that the baroque selfreflectiveness of his age would quickly bear: “This kind of whimsy only works once,” he said of his own overripe meta-theatrical L’Illusion Comique (1635).21 People cannot tire of being reminded that they are reading a novel or watching a play or listening to music unless they are tired of art. The reminder that fiction is fiction is integral to fiction; thus metafiction is only a degree of fiction, not a qualitative leap. People will weary of artistic fiction when the premise needed to enjoy it (i.e., the rise of reason, the demystification of nature, and the preeminence of science) passes away. If and when the conquest of material reality is complete, and human existence goes entirely virtual, then presumably fiction will outlive its purpose. In other words, art will overcome fiction upon the return of magic and the re-enchantment of reality. Until then, and so long as there is anti-art, fiction is safe.

A tired story All the same, there is something to be said for Corneille’s remark that metaart gets old fast. An art form that betakes itself to revolutionize art, innovate, and upset the apple cart—that is, an art which brings on itself the curse of fashion, that is, that it too will be pushed aside. This awareness is part of the mental furniture of modernity; it accounts for its inner lassitude—that secret streak of old age beneath the outward show of rebellious youth. Let’s agree, as it is claimed, that the modern novel is born with Don Quixote; not by coincidence its novelness is laced with lassitude. Don Quixote is a tired novel—a piece of literary art that tells us what weary business it is to have to revolutionize the old and spawn the new. For Don Quixote builds on a field of ruins—the decrepit formulas of knightly romances ripe for retirement. “Art must now invent a new style for this newest paladin,” says the opening of Part II (DQ, 447). Art, now, new, newest: these words weld into each other during the modern period and make a bundle that the modern artist carries on her back. Be new or else: this fateful command rings through works of art in the age of historical artistic self-consciousness, that is, in modernity. Thus Don Quixote: it rises out of the premise that a certain medievalRenaissance way of telling stories had run its course and that something else must take its place. But what is that “something else,” that little new thing? In the case of Cervantes, it is a prolonged lampoon of the style and ethos of the old literature. This, on the face of it, is a poor premise of innovation: What sort of novel(ty) looks back to the past? Pastiche is inherently related to the canonic; it is a clown dancing on a graveyard. The Argentine homme de lettres Leopoldo Lugones once stated that “el estilo es la debilidad de

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Cervantes” (style is Cervantes’s weakness).22 The observation first struck me as nonsensical (since the book’s genius is obviously style, and not its wearying parade of scams and stunts) until I was reminded that the style of Don Quixote is a caricature of ossified forms which does not replace them. Rather, it magnifies their quirks and mannerisms, the parody of which admits weakness vis-à-vis tradition; it is a failure to be strongly and unapologetically new. If, as is continuously claimed, literary modernity is born with Cervantes, then modernity is born a tired thing. As a point of fact, the history of the novel (of the little new thing) is a leitmotif about the tiredness of its own genre. Don Quixote is the news that novels are old hat. There is scarcely a novelistic period that fails to relay the same message thereafter. “All the variety of which this species of literary entertainment is capable seems almost exhausted, and novels themselves no longer charm us with novelty,” said an English critic of the mid-1700s.23 It’s true that the nineteenth century swelled the fortunes of novel writing until the twentieth century made it official: the novel was dead and buried. Samuel Beckett wrote entire novels to impress the fact. “It’s impossible to write a novel nowadays,” says Günter Grass in his novel The Tim Drum (1959). It seems the novel likes to flirt with its own obituary—the better to rise out of the ashes. As the consummate modern form, the novel (it’s in the name) is under a permanent duty to innovate. It has to declare that the novel has come to an end that it must start again from a clean slate. However, so long as one begins on a premise of tabula rasa, one acknowledges that which has been, and one is therefore beholden to a tradition. The mandate of novelty dooms its children to premature old age. As I have done to my elders, so shall it be done unto me: I will be retired before my time. This tragic knowledge of one’s creeping obsolescence, and of the mayfly lifespan of cultural endeavors in general, is built into the logic of modernity. Don Quixote, the novel that packed off shelves of novels into irrelevance, is haunted by its own looming outmodedness. The last line of Part I says, “Forsi altro canterà con miglior plectio” (DQ, 449): “Perhaps another will sing in a better style.” In other words, this, too, will be made old. The sentiment is pervasive enough that Cervantes inserts the sentence again ten years later in the first chapter of Part II (DQ, 468). Its dictum should be carved on the lintel of the house of modernity. Ye who enter must know that you come after an exemplary past and before a faithless future. That the past is exemplary is confirmed by your urge to knock it down. (There is no artistic valor in repudiating something of no consequence.) The more modernity elbows for a space of its own, the more crippled it is by the knowledge of arriving late. “Forgetting has no place in Don Quijote,” Cervantes says (DQ, 845), and this is true of his novel at large. Both drown in a surfeit of memory, up to their necks in historical awareness; both, as Joyce would say, are trying to wake up from the nightmare of history (its nightmarishness being that it flows into the present).

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Facing forward, things look just as difficult because modernity harbors a disloyal progeny. To begin with, the modern endeavor must not strike roots lest it be said that it is established and staid. The short-termism of the modern, its inner-directed disloyalty, and lassitude—all this overspreads its projects with jadedness. Every new thing is greeted with the jaundiced reserve of one who has seen it all before. Hence the baroque philosophy of Don Quixote— that the world is a stage, that we are all play actors in a masquerade called “society.” The novel knows that this philosophy is bound to be hackneyed and professes to be bored with it now. Look, says Quixote, how emperors and pontiffs and everyone in the world plays a role. “‘That’s a fine comparison,’ said Sancho, ‘though not so new that I haven’t heard it many times before’” (DQ, 527). La vida es sueño: this insight into the inauthenticity of human life, so fresh and new, and already so passé, so inauthentic: a concetto we cannot quite believe in now, given that truths are time bound. *

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Is it any wonder, given the inexorable verdict of futility, if the begetting of modernity should induce lassitude? Notable in Don Quixote is the seeping writerly fatigue.24 The Prologue greets us with a lament about the vainness and languor of creating Don Quixote. “What could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts?” (DQ, 3). This isn’t just preemptive modesty, for Cervantes goes on. He could not have produced a satisfactory outcome because, he says, “I am by nature too lazy and slothful” (DQ, 5). Here we are reminded (since no slouch can have produced the hefty tome of Quixote’s adventures) that, if not slothful, Cervantes is a creator in old age. Like Quixote—“a gentleman approximately fifty years old” (DQ, 19)— he is past the age of charging at the windmill of fame. Certainly, Quixote loses every fight or joust on his path, which is a long string of flops. In the same spirit does Cervantes introduce his book, making the subject of his Prologue his inability to write. “I can tell you that although [the book] cost me some effort to compose, none seemed greater than creating the preface you are now reading. I picked up my pen many times to write it, and many times I put it down again” (DQ, 4). We are more or less deep in Beckettian prose three hundred years before the fact, with an Escher-like hand writing about its being in the act of writing or, in fact, not writing. The topic of this meta-literature is not playful exuberance and fecundity but exhaustion. Don Quixote is creation squeezed out of creative barrenness; it is scarcity made visible: “I emerge now, carrying all my years on my back, with a tale as dry as esparto grass, devoid of invention, deficient in style, poor in ideas, and lacking all erudition and doctrine” (DQ, 4). Don Quixote does better than this, of course, but why should we deny that this is the spirit in which it was conceived (e.g., devoid of invention, style, ideas, erudition, doctrine)?

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Taking this spirit seriously means that Don Quixote debunks two of the legends of modern artistry: one, grown out of the Italian Renaissance and later revived by Romanticism, is the idea of the bubbling irrepressible genius; the other, that modernity has to do with youth, freshness, vigor, and futurity. If we heed Cervantes’s tone, we may consider that modernity, understood as a desperate flight forward, is born of fatigue, melancholia, impotence, Weltschmerz, and cynicism. Cervantes’s prose, for one, is not lively or forceful. Expansive, verbose, ironic, mocking of pomposity and pretension, yes; but not electrified by the energy of youthful purpose. In fact, it displays the flaws of the old literature which it skewers: incoherence, implausibility, exaggeration, repetitiousness, meandering plotting, haphazardness, and so forth.25 The repetitiousness is particularly telling. It speaks of a stuttering máquina. Just as Quixote keeps making the same mistake with senile obstinacy and never learns from it, so Cervantes goes round and round the loop of the same practical joke time and again: Quixote madly believes that X is Y; Quixote tests his belief; X turns out to be X; Quixote ends up with egg on his face and bruises on his body. Four or five such occurrences would make the point, but 900 pages worth? There is something pathological about this persistency. Cervantes seems to know he lacks narrative headway and resorts to the tonic of interpolated tales. Still, these so-called novellas hang to the main narrative trestle by a very thin thread. They violate Cervantes’s own rule that a novel should not be “composed with so many members that the intention seems to shape a chimera or a monster rather than a wellproportioned figure” (DQ, 412). To be sure, miscellanies were all the rage in his day. Yet Cervantes seems to have feared, even as he indulged them, that their presence was a trick. Don Quixote reads like a book that gets tired of itself. The tales out of frame multiply; anecdotes are recounted twice and even thrice, followed by the same arguments pro and con between Quixote and Sancho. “And so they returned to the King’s highway and followed it with no set plan or purpose in mind” (DQ, 157). The aimlessness spreads over the narrative which gropes for a plot. It veritably decelerates as it goes on, an effect (decelerated duration) much imitated by Modernists and nouveau-romanciers.26 And like them, Cervantes leverages this groping into metafictional mischief (such as the sentence which interrupts a sword fight in midcourse and never recounts the outcome). At other times, the tiredness feels deep-rooted and endemic. At one junction, Quixote is astonished that Sancho should end a tale in midstream. Sancho retorts, “‘That may be, but I know that in my story there’s nothing else to say: it ended right where you lost count of the number of goats that had crossed.’—‘Then let it end where it will,’ said Quixote” (DQ, 147). The explanation is formalist and tautological: a tale ends, not when it has satisfied exigencies of progress, balance, coherence, and conclusiveness, but when it stops. “Let it end where it will”: this is bathos and fatigue dressed up as authorial flippancy.

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Take this other example: a Dorothea tells a story. She is interrupted, then bidden to resume. She says, “There is no need to continue,” and thus without any further explanation another storyline dies in mid-breath (DQ, 253). It is as though the interest Cervantes had in telling it has evaporated, and he is resigned to his fatigue. It becomes a style of authorial willfulness, much reprised by the moderns. When pressed to explain herself, Dorothea cites the “continual and extraordinary difficulties [that] take away the memory of the one who suffers them” (DQ, 254). This is false, of course. Cervantes does not extract his tales out of memory but from his imagination. It, more than anything else, gives him trouble. And that trouble is what drives the story of an old man who is going nowhere with his imaginings, a man whose every self-narrated fabulous exploit comes to naught, a man who fails to write his life’s story in the way he would like it to play. Elsewhere, Cervantes says, “If I had the time, I would tell you something of what that soldier did, which would entertain and amaze you much more than this recounting of my story” (DQ, 344). Cervantes has all the time he could want; what he lacks is the inclination. The novel is in the spirit of the Prologue, which confesses it would have been a prologue had the writer been up for it. Why not believe Cervantes? Why not take his word that his story is overshadowed by the amazing story he wished he could have told?

The penury of modernity To be sure, the amazing novel such as it stands is amazing enough. Virtuosic in style and puckish in tone, fond and sad and endlessly argumentative. Yet in mood and philosophical temperament it is an autumnal story. Cervantes is nearing the end of his life when he writes it, and he stands at the tail end of a tradition. His aim is not to innovate but to terminate. His novel mulls over the art that has been and which can no longer be; it has but the dimmest notion of the art that must be. A vein of passéist nihilism runs through it. Its convictions are unclear. It is against novels but is extremely novelistic. It mocks high-minded idealism but sniffs at pragmatic shrewdness. Cervantes deplores, yet admires, idealism; pragmatism dismays him, but he tilts for it. He lambastes lettered affectation but reckons that plain speech is equally stylistic (see Part I, chapter 16). What does Cervantes believe in? He believes neither in the literature he mocks nor in the remedy he holds out. He hovers in cultural depression. This is a sizable ingredient of the “modern”—an elaborate, verbose cultural fatigue. Given its tinge of resignation, the most perceptive gloss of Don Quixote must be Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1941). Menard is a twentieth-century littérateur who imbibed the spirit of Cervantes so well that he, Menard, proposes to write, without actually copying, an entire chapter of Don Quixote that would be a

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verbatim replica of the original. Taking the art of creative self-obliteration to the extreme, Menard succeeds. He does with Don Quixote what Quixote does with chivalric romances: he blends fully with the (holy) writ, and the word becomes flesh. Not that the enterprise isn’t futile. Menard, Borges tells us, “decided to anticipate the vanity awaiting all man’s efforts . . . [through] an undertaking which was exceedingly complex and, from the very beginning, futile.”27 This Quixotic futility is a distinctively modern tone—at any rate it is modernity’s stoic greatness. Thus, Borges will have us know: in every point slavish to Cervantes’s original text, Menard’s version is nevertheless “almost infinitely richer” than its archetype. This superiority is not formal but moral. It is the moral superiority of he who knows he arrives after the fact, but makes this, his belatedness, a point of pride. It has a tragic dignity unknown to the predecessor. For Cervantes’s version doesn’t know that it would become the Cervantean Text, whereas Menard is Cervantes’s version plus the nostalgic distance, the antiquarian sheen, and inferiority complex clad in noble resignation. This grandeur (“the almost infinite richness” of Menard’s version) is the consolation of the mannered, the decadent, that is, the modern. Decadence is a loaded word (see my “Introduction”), but my meaning is simply etymological: decadent is what falls away, occurs downstream, and comes afterward. Modernity is first and foremost an intensely aesthetic culture whose point of reference is volens nolens the past (studied, isolated, cultivated, reviled, feared, flogged, or pedestaled, as the case may be). In everything it does, the modern faces the unremitting question “What now?” by which it is understood that “now” must transcend the past. In fact, this need to transcend at any cost pays a compliment to the primacy of history, so that the modern artist has so thoroughly internalized the history of art that her every creative sally (like Quixote’s on the roads of Spain) is written on old parchment. Modernity is incurably old-think. Borges would have us know that this old-think is the greatness of high Modernist (also called Postmodern) art. Perhaps. But it adds little to Cervantes’s already modern text, and Menard’s art of ironic repetition treads in the footprints of Don Quixote which, too, was an echo chamber. The novel came after three decades of Cervantes trying to make his name writing original tales and plays to rival the likes of Lope de Vega. When that failed, he decided at the age of fifty-six to give triteness a try: he wrote a yarn about a fool who imitates stale novels in a style barely distinguishable from those novels. If this imitation is what “modern” means (and Borges seems to believe it is), then Don Quixote is modern, but the term clearly is a misnomer wrapped in a misunderstanding: modern is not the victory of “now”; it is the victory of anachronism, of the impossibility of being sincerely of one’s own time. *

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This realization colors the outlook of modern creation, which is typically riddled with doubt. The modern work of art always seems on the verge of calling out the whole sham of art. Thus, chapter XXIV of Don Quixote (Part II) calls its immediate predecessor (chapter XXIII) “apocryphal” (DQ, 614). Why is this chapter apocryphal? Nothing distinguishes it from the others: it speaks in the same voice, is printed in the same ink, and is no less substantial than the rest. If this chapter is untrue, there is no reason why the rest of Don Quixote isn’t. Of course, we know that, this being a work of fiction, what we read about is untrue; but this is not the level of falsity nor therefore the level of self-doubt, which Cervantes invites us to plumb here. The falsehood of fiction doesn’t lie in misrepresentation; it isn’t the liar twisting the facts. In fiction, there are no facts to twist. If I say in life, “Peter came home past midnight last night,” the statement is either true or false. If I say it in fiction, it is neither true nor false. Rather it is apocryphal; that is, it comes from a source that is irrelevant, dismissible, inconsequential, and empty. Fiction can say whatever it wants because nothing of what it says matters. It is the language of lunatics—of Quixote the apocryph. Of course, when I say that nothing said in fiction matters, I mean it so long as fiction keeps to itself and does not nose its way into reality. The inconsequentiality of fiction does matter when the fantasist exports his dreams into the world. Then, fiction starts to lie, and lies matter, and are punished accordingly. On this score, we notice that, much as Don Quixote rides on irrepressible storytelling (and piles stories upon stories, and storytellers upon storytellers), it is ultimately not about the power of fiction but about its debility and chastisement at the hands of reality. It is not about fiction’s power to change the world; it is about reality showing art where it belongs—in places called libraries, museums, insane asylums. Yes, the modern period saw the thing called art setup shop, and grow important and respectable and indispensable, sometimes even claiming the center of the spiritual and moral life; but this process of self-establishment runs concurrently with one of demystification and ultimately involves the cordoning-off of fictional language. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), the literary critic Terry Eagleton explains that aesthetic creation became the pattern of reality-making and society-building in the modern period, that the whole of reality become conceived of as an artifact. There is no denying that this presumption was widespread in modernity, especially among philosophers and critics who tend to be people of the word anyway— Quixote-like literalists and top-down Platonists. But Don Quixote hands a note to these people many of whom claim Cervantes’s novel as the exemplar of artistic modernity: that artistic modernity is a melancholy insight into the weakness and subservience of aesthetic discourse. It is about the cordoningoff of art from life, not the turning of life into art. If the birthplace of modernity is mannerism, this is precisely because mannerism marks the time when confidence in art wobbled, and art turned inward and against

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itself. The large claims aesthetic life thereafter made on its own behalf, and which triumphed in the self-congratulation fest of Romanticism, are merely symptomatic of an inferiority complex, a sense of futility, a creeping suspicion of irrelevance—all the things that are the tone and timbre of Cervantes’s masterpiece.

To die, to sleep—no more The futility, the suspicion of irrelevance, the impotence of fiction—these shadows weigh on Don Quixote as it wears on. Along these lines, we must note that Quixote doesn’t die from one of his adventures. No joust or bad fall does him in. Rather, he, “the world’s greatest literary hero” (according to a recent estimate), dies of weariness with literature, heroism, and himself.28 His terminal despondency comes suddenly and inexplicably. One moment he is as deluded as ever; the next he takes to his bed, and nothing can shake him out of his sorrow (DQ, 934). What happened? In fact, nothing that has not happened before. He still believes in Dulcinea. Indeed, right before he takes to bed, he talks of embarking on the career of Shepherd Quixotiz, hero of a pastoral novel (DQ, 931). Then suddenly his drive to tell himself a new story gives out. He is weary, he wants to die. “Don’t die, Señor,” says Sancho in despair; “the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy” (DQ, 937). Sancho is right: wanting to die is great madness on Quixote’s part; but in fact it has been his overarching madness all along (of which the rest, the forced hallucinations, the straining to believe, etc., were epiphenomena). A few chapters earlier, Quixote had told Sancho “Let me die at the hands of my thoughts. . . . I was born to live by dying” (DQ, 842). A very Christian thought, to be sure, that would have pleased the Desert Fathers. But this “living by dying” also encapsulates the melancholy mood of the book, of a life heroically dedicated to fiction which dies on contact with reality. “Living by dying” captures the sense of grasping at straws, of repetition, of running on empty, of patterns and ideas milked dry, of a novel, finally, which runs on self-repudiation. Quixote dies (and Don Quixote ends) somewhat in the leave-taking mood of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“Our revels now are ended. These our actors . . . were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air”), but because the Cervantine revels were always ridiculed by reality, Quixote doesn’t leave an enchanted stage. In a way, he always knew he was made of fictional thin air. His final resignation (in the sense of taking leave) formalizes the resignation (in the sense of renouncement) that suffuses his journey. Early in the novel Cervantes says of Quixote that “if he did not achieve great things, he died in the effort to perform them” (DQ, 206). The great thing sought

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by Quixote was of course to write a novel, his novel, the fiction of his life. If he dies in the effort, it is not as if he hoped to succeed. Thus, Don Quixote: the novel that does not believe in novels; the novel about the weakness and futility of art. Here again we are forced to the conclusion that if this is the birth of modernity, then modernity is not about the triumph of the life aesthetic, of life-as-a-work-of-art; it is about the institutionalizing of art. Our revels are ended indeed. *

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This, then, casts an interesting light on the period that will concern us henceforth, which dawns circa 1800 under Romanticism and continues up to these here Postmodern and post-Postmodern days. Never has the star of art been so high in the cultural sky—it is up there in the constellation with politics, religion, science, and education. Having museums to call its own, and institutes and biennales and university programs and government budgets dedicated to its well-being, art enjoys unparalleled esteem in society. Just the same, this esteem is purchased at a price, of which Don Quixote serves advance notice. The price, roughly put, consists of the fictionalizing of art. It is the narrative and moral spring of Cervantes’s novel that art is first and foremost fiction, that it boils down to a matter of representation, and that representation is intellectual seclusion and the poor cousin of reality. Though pervasive—storytelling is everywhere on the roads of La Mancha, or Spain, or the world—fiction nevertheless goes in the beggarly dress of knight errantry, irrelevance, deceit, and often ridicule. This, at first blush, should do little to endear Don Quixote to an artloving culture. Yet, according to a worldwide survey conducted in 2002, a hundred authors from fifty-two countries found Cervantes’s novel to be “the most meaningful book of all time.” It also remains the second most translated book, after only the Bible. This says something about what we moderns like about literature and art: adventures happening in the soft cell of mental delusion, make-believe gainsaying itself, a masquerade, a cloistered meditation, priestly withdrawal from mundane life. The quixotism of modern art Herman Melville laid out in an unpublished poem called “The Rusty Man”: In La Mancha he mopeth With beard thin and dusty; He doteth and mopeth In library fusty— ’Mong his old folios gropeth: Cites obsolete saws Of chivalry’s laws— Be the wronged one’s knight:

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Die, but do right. So he rusts and musts, While each grocer green Thriveth apace with the fulsome face Of a fool serene. This is a précis of modern-art folk wisdom. Here is the artist as a champion of useless lore; the knight of the vita contemplativa; the misunderstood, anachronistic sage; the voice of conscience and idealism in a world where grocers thrive. These monkish traits still appeal to the proudly unworldly twenty-first-century litterateur, and insure the continuing fascination with Don Quixote. Let it be known, however, that it is fascination with withdrawal and defeat dressed as noblesse oblige. Don Quixote is art intellectualized, rationalized, and locked in the athenaeum. This quixotification of art (read: neutralization) threads through modernity, and it took a contrarian like Friedrich Nietzsche to call attention to it in a long essay, ostensibly on Greek tragedy, of 1872 (see Chapter 10). Like the French archaeologist Quatremère de Quincy before him, Nietzsche saw that the modern cult of art actually drove a wall between art and life. Behind this wall, art enjoyed preservation, curation, adoration—yes, but at the cost of petrification. Art was an object of refined appreciation, a virtual reality we worshipped at the museum, the theater, or the opera house. Nietzsche wanted to break art from this gilded prison. In essence, he wanted to de-modernize it, roll back the historical event of mannerism, plunge back into an archaic past when, supposedly, aesthetic experience was one with civic, moral, religious life. For reasons I have laid out in this book (see Chapter 1, subsection “Once an image, always an image” and the subsection “Make-Disbelieve” of the present chapter) and in deeper detail in a previous volume, I do not think that representations can be experienced otherwise than fictively.29 The ecstatic reunion of art with reality sought by Nietzsche strikes me as the fantasy of a rationalistic age that dreams of a past when everything was more pristine, hale, and whole. In fact, the fantasied return of art to life merely underscores its separation from life. This is not to deny that a great deal of modern art rues its modernity and that it is premised on undoing its own status as art—all the while hanging on to it, of course, for without the institution of art to frame it, the lived Dionysian piece of art of Modernist vintage (e.g., participatory, performance, experiential, interactive art that would have us join the make-believe in earnest, the same way Quixote charges at enchanted windmills) forgoes notice. Art in the modern period is doomed to call itself “art.” Artists may not always like it; they may dedicate art to this dislike (like Hamlet, who wanted to be so much more than a character in a play). Still, they cannot elude it. Our age is Cervantine. A hundred authors from fifty-two countries say so.

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In summary We have now fairly surveyed the segment of our history over which the cornerstones of artistic modernity move into place. These founding blocks are, to name the main ones, originality, freedom, creativity, novelty, and critical self-consciousness. We have seen how these new ideas quicken the works of three artists (Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes). In these artists is a dawning realization of the powers and prerogatives of art and, in equal measure, disenchantment with these powers. Common to them also is a yearning to escape the boundaries of expression—an escape which, because it must fail, disappoints artistic ambition and turns the artist against his own medium. This turning of the pen, the chisel, the paintbrush against themselves is part of the modern event. It gives rise to an aesthetic of the creative gesture second-guessed, of the veil of illusion both torn asunder and yet maintained. Born of a dissatisfaction with art, modern art is very much the child of a restless society—impatient with the old ways of social hierarchies, religion, industry, commerce, political economy, and so on. Yet unlike these domains of social activity, modern art seeks more than merely a reforming of the old. Modern art is not a change of style; it is a rebellion against the very fact of art, its making, its reason for being, its identity. This rebellion is quixotic because it expresses itself artistically and because it is defeating to make art in order to transcend art. Part Two of this volume proposes to survey the action of this root contradiction in the developments of modern art from roughly 1800 onward. Unsurprisingly, these developments are thick with paradoxes—productive incongruities to be sure, but incongruities nevertheless. For this reason I call them “legends”: legends for failing the test of fact and reason, legends also for weaving communities of thought and activity together. This legendry of modern art I have divided into roughly eight streams that make the headings of the chapters below. They make a tight, yet uneven and hardly consistent mesh, these legends. One thread may be in prominence at one time, but recedes in another. This is why the following section, though historical in overview, is more thematic than chronological. We begin, however, with a chronological milestone: the Romantic upheaval.

PART TWO

What Makes Modern Art

4 The Inward Turn

The righteous heir of mannerism—that is, of an art whose main preoccupation is art—isn’t the baroque, which followed it, or Classicism, or Rococo but Romanticism. The period between the 1620s and 1790s produced plenty of great art though none that touched the high pitch of tortured preciousness as the mannerist period at one end, and the Romantic-modern period at the other. Not that there is want of fastidious art in the intervening period—the English metaphysical poets of the early seventeenth century, the school of Scudéry in the France of Louis XIV, the allegorism of the late Flemish style of Jan Brueghel the Younger among others. But none evince quite the same level of defensive despair and willfulness in contradiction as mannerism. The latter sprang out of societal breakdown in the war between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in France, Germany, and England. Mannerism ended after 1650 when state power was reasserted on the strength of royal bureaucracies and army-backed parliaments. Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) was the handbook of the unsure, contested chieftain. Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is the primer on absolutist government. The arts fell in tune with this top-down realignment. It is then the baroque, which was born of the frayed nerves of late mannerism, turned from a wavering style into a declamatory one: an art of pomp and assertion. The fatal braininess of Hamlet, the grotesque ineptitude of Quixote, together with the involute literary lines that conveyed them—it gave way to the hero-worship and plangent oratory of Corneille’s Le Cid (1636) and the Titanism of Milton. Whereas Hamlet’s solipsism eclipsed Elsinore, in Racine’s tragedies, the intermittencies of the heart are crushed by reasons of state. Duty is unconditional. If Michelangelo’s late creations were, like Hamlet, powerless to act and resentful of being, Bernini’s baroque sculptures scream action, fierce and unswerving. No room for artistic equivocations about the glorious impotence of artistic creation there. Art is once again there to assist certainties. This sense of duty permeates the arts until the Romantic upheaval. Duty to the crown, duty to mores and traditions, duty to honor, duty to the civilizing virtues, and finally, in the eighteenth century, duty to the progress

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of humankind—these modulate aesthetic discourse, and the artistic currents and controversies of the period generally abide by a social ideal. When disagreement occurs, such as the French Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns and the English Battle of the Books of the 1690s, it tends to be about the nature of this social ideal, and not whether art should serve it. Art amuses, instructs, uplifts, civilizes; it soothes, it scolds, it ameliorates, it unifies public taste, soothes factional “rancor.” Throughout this so-called classical period, art accepts marching orders from society, makes little pretension of autonomy, let alone of lording it over people. Only with the rise of a middle-class political economy did things stir once more in the house of art. Then writers and painters found themselves amid a vastly expanded popular public whose demands were not quite as clear-cut as those of the royal censor. The question “What is wanted of me?” then retreated before the overwhelming quandary: What do I want? This question becomes the mainspring of art. Already in the second half of the eighteenth century, we see the novel harking back to the Cervantean mode— for example, in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Diderot’s Jacques Le Fataliste, and Fielding’s parodies. Sterne makes it clear that his chief source of interest is himself writing the novel; his readers are led to dissect the act of writing and their own act of reading. Hence the word “Romantic” which suggests that it is all about the novel, fiction-making, and the imaginative force behind it. *

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Romanticism drew impetus from a bewildering variety of sources: local folklore, national sentiment, the Middle Ages, Gothic romance, Shakespeare, nature, music, religious emotion, God, godlessness, the infinite, et al. Most of all, it was a revolt against reason (which is one and universal and therefore overreaching) in favor of intuition (unpredictably personal, local, diverse, and undefined). So the fulcrum of Romanticism was really the individual—the thinking and feeling subjectivity that catches everything— life, reality, society, god, and the cosmos—in its inner mirror. It, the self, is the spring, crux, and terminus of Romantic expression, next to which reality is a dream and a projection. As Hegel said, “The first idea is the presentation of my self as an absolute free entity. Along with the free, selfconscious essence there stands forth—out of nothing—an entire world.”1 Consciousness is not receptive but creative; it is the logos at the source of the real. In this sense, the English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” to mean that artists are, of all human beings, those that act fully on the world being one’s consciousness thereof and, in this sense, “legislate” the terms on which life is met. Romanticism is l’imagination au pouvoir, as the street demonstrators of May 1968 chanted, and the poetic self has no higher moral duty than

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to keep his legislating power free of external meddling. Only then does the artist achieve the truest type of human being, the one who acts on the essentially creative and autonomous nature of consciousness. This philosophy, if it has French and English precedents (Descartes, Locke), is really and especially of German concoction. It is summarized in the words of German Romantic F. W. J. Schelling: The human spirit is primordially autonomous, it is a being that not only supports within itself the ground but also the limit of its own being and its reality, and whose limits consequently cannot be determined by anything external, a self-contained and intrinsically complete totality, a monogram, as it were, of freedom constructed out of the infinite and the finite.2 Qua consciousness, the self is a universe onto itself; though it lives in the physical world (and in this sense is finite), it can never overstep the horizon of its apprehension and is therefore infinite. Wherever and however far the “I” wanders, it comes upon its own thoughts. To the effect that there is one subject matter of Romantic expression and that is individual consciousness hovering in limitless subjectivity. This philosophy was rich soil for the revival of an idea somewhat left fallow since the late Renaissance: the idea of artistic genius. But “genius” in Michelangelo’s time designated an individual of exceptional skill recognized by the comity of artists and patrons. Not so the Romantic genius who really only needs his own vote of confidence. To the Romantic “genius” means nothing other than the fierce resolve to go it alone and be oneself. As the poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller said, “Every true genius must be naïve, or it is not genius.”3 “Naïve” (from nativus) here means inborn, instinctive, unadulterated. Genius is its own genus. Combined with the solipsism of Romantic philosophy, this means that the genius artist mostly draws from inner resources. External reality, whether in the form of nature, society, history, or sentimental love, supplies the raw material; but the gist of artistic creation is the melting and smelting itself. Genius is “free and natural,” said Schiller; it works by itself, out of inner momentum and direction. “Genius is the talent which gives the rule to art,” wrote Kant.4 Thus genius is not there to serve art; rather, art is in the service of genius. No self-respecting artist should seek the guidance of existing laws. Rather, his ingenium is the law.5 This individualization of artistic expression has had tremendous effects on Western culture high and low. One of these effects is paradoxical: primitivistic Romantic naivete has produced more, rather than less, selfconscious art. A work of art that attends to external realities admits of a greater preoccupation than itself and therefore shares the attention. If it is fixed on itself insofar as the artifice is concerned, it is mindful of an order of things that abides independently of it. The strong pull of self-consciousness

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is balanced by the world-directed gaze. Absent external bearings, however, genius takes center stage and, like a permanent adolescent, thinks only of itself. Genius-mongering paradoxically leads to the decay of ingenuousness, of naivete. More knowing, more critical, more second-guessing: such is in fact the Romantic genius next to the markedly less neurotic art-maker of yore. Recognizing the fatefully unspontaneous character of Romanticism, the poet and philosopher K. W. F. Schlegel observed that its art is shot through with “a poetic theory of the creative act”: “In each of its depictions poetry should depict itself and always will be at one and the same time poetry, and poetry about poetry.”6 It seems we cannot have individuality and ingenuousness at the same time: a strongly subjective philosophy of art will yield strongly mannered self-consciousness of forms. Another curious upshot of artistic individualization, of art made of a “human spirit that is primordially autonomous” (Schelling), is in fact a less defined experience, or the opposite of what would be expected of an expression whose premise is the strongly singularized person. But the outcome is actually quite logical: where art is made of an artist’s subjectivity only, of moods and musings only, there can be no fixed end to the process. An art form that has the limits of subjectivity is necessarily horizon-shaped, open-ended, amorphous, that is, not a form at all. Subjective art is not only an exhilarating train to jump on (there is nowhere it doesn’t go, like Faust riding the whirlwind) but also disconcerting (it never lets you off, and has no terminus). To quote Schlegel again, Romantic poetry is in the process of becoming: this indeed is its very essence, the fact that it will always be in the process of becoming, that it will never be completed. It cannot be explained away by any theory. . . . It alone is infinite, as it alone is free, recognizing as its fundamental law that the willfulness of the poet recognizes no law.7 Self-ruled, scornful of precedent, free, this is modern art in a nutshell. But freedom comes at a cost, in this instance, fragility. Once the poet’s emotional life becomes the stuff and drive of his work, the latter rises or falls with the strength or weakness of his moods. The artist throws over rules, conventions, and workshop recipes, but lets in a new taskmaster in their stead called “the willfulness of the poet” (Schlegel) which, if truly it is willful, is arbitrary. For the artistic heart has its intermittencies. At times, it may be stout and inspired; at other times, it will be listless and wan. Whatever the case, the poet must submit, and when willfulness is not in the mood and has nothing to give, then he has to accept his hour of weakness and face the ebb of art. He is, as the saying goes, blocked. We have identified three paradoxical consequences of the modernRomantic turn of art. One is that, in the name of ingenuousness, it leads to increased self-consciousness. The second is that, in the name of autonomous

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form, it leads to formlessness. And the third is that, in the name of free will, art succumbs to the tyranny of facts. Romantic art is steeped in these paradoxes. For evidence, let us turn to examples of Romantic poetry. *

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Our stock idea of the Romantic genius is of the loner riding the storm of inspiration. This state of clifftop exaltation, however, is only half the bargain. Another outcome of staking everything on willfulness is lethargy, and therefore lack of art. Such depletion is the subject of quite a few, and by no means insignificant, poems of the Romantic period. “Bread and Wine” (1801) by the German poet Hölderlin laments a world now bereft of enchantment. Once the world was full of gods. “But, friend, we come too late.” Ours is a weak age, too fainted-hearted for the wine of Dionysus, too rational to stomach wonder. We are an uninspired race. What is art to do in these doldrums? “What to do and what to say in the meantime / I do not know, and what are poets for in times of dearth?” What they are for is to confess impotence and apathy, a lack of desire to go on with the feeble business of poetry. “I feel it is better to sleep than to be, as now, so companionless” (so unaccompanied by spirit), Hölderlin continues. Given this mood, “Bread and Wine” must be a paradoxical poem which like a fish mouth moves voicelessly, resigned to impotence. It speaks of the despair of achieving great poetry. Having lost his Aeolian harp of transcendence, the poet must do with a banjo. He turns over his broken instrument, confounded by its jangly sound, its narrow range, its pitiful inadequacy. After the wine of intoxication, the hangover of toil. Thus, Samuel Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), written in almost the same year as “Bread and Wine.” Outwardly the ode is about mental depression, “a grief without pang, void, dark, and drear,” but inwardly it is once again about the waning of poetic willfulness. “My genial spirits fail,” says Coleridge, and he means his ingenium, “the beauty-making power” of his former inspiration, “my shaping spirit of imagination.” He has none of its left, and the poem is therefore a paradox which, should it be true to its premise, ought not to exist. The result, as in Hölderlin’s poem, is more selfconsciousness, more poetry about poetry, and the beginning of what we may call a scholastic form of art. “But to be still and patient, [is] all I can.” The Romantic turns technician, takes his lute apart, wonders at its parts. He is become theoretical and grammatical. “Haply by abstruse research to steal / From my own nature all the natural man— / This was my sole resource, my only plan.” In short, the wind of inspiration gone, all the poet has left is a theory of the poetic act. The wild-child genius grows into his opposite, the aesthetic scholar. Ingenium wakes up to find it is all engineering. In another poem that ought not to exist, the “Ode on Indolence” (1819), John Keats confesses himself too drowsy and listless to make art. “Benumb’d

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[are] my eyes,” he says, and from eyes benumbed (a reprise of Coleridge’s “still I gaze—and with how blank an eye”?) soaring poetry is seldom born. Except, Keats is of course writing an ode, and since it is an ode about its begetting, or lack thereof, it marks a turn toward the technical and the aesthetic at the polar opposite of inspired spontaneity. The object of Keats’s dulled eyes is a Phidian urn on which is carved a maiden figure of Poesy. In his torpor, the poet imagines the urn turning and the figure coming round and round. It is as though the poem stares at its own emptily spinning wheels, “leav[ing] my sense / Unhaunted quite of all but nothingness.” In this “nothingness” we behold an artistic consciousness which, having sucked the world into itself, flounders in its vortex, conscious of its consciousness of the world, and the consciousness of poetry. Having made a god of itself, inner inspiration (the sole true fountain of art, according to Coleridge) is now the only thing left, and Romantic art becomes art about art—academic one more, precious, artful. The Romantic poet was fully aware of this fatal theoretic turn and moved to redress it, dissemble it in a further justifying legend. In his Defence of Poetry (1821), P. B. Shelley assures his audience that the creative act is “the feeble shadow of the original conception”: The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within. . . . Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline. The work of art, Shelley tells us, is the afterglow of a star that has set. It is the dross of the supreme vision that once burned bright in the artist’s soul— all of which makes for a startling confession. After all, it is not every day that a profession (be it poets, pontiffs, or plumbers) advertises its incapacity. When this happens, we must suspect that a face-saving strategy is being put to work. Why “Bread and Wine,” “Dejection: An Ode,” and “Ode on Indolence”? What is the use of exhibiting artistic weakness? One obvious purpose is to forestall criticism—to grant the poet immunity from criticism. The confession of impotence is about keeping the Romantic artist on his pedestal. Advertised mediocrity, in fact, seeks to advertise the glory of an inner conception which somehow finds the usual human channels of expression unfit for its delivery. The artistic artifact is too mundane a vessel to contain the poet’s sublime apprehension. I would not be so tonguetied if I were not so god-filled, the poet implies, and his defeat is proof and consequence of genius. As the late Romantic Théophile Gautier said, the great work of art need only exist “in the mind of the artist,” and we are therefore to take it for a cardinal truth that, however disappointing or second-rate the results are, the hidden fountain of genius is of the purest kind.8 Not by his art shall you know the artist, for there is no straight causation between one’s

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genius and one’s achievement, and it is technically possible to call oneself an artist without the product to show for it. This development is congruent with the Romantic exaltation of the artist, of which the work of art need not be more than a pale advocate. The more unassuming the advocate, in fact, the higher we should think of the ineffable genius that did not condescend to descend into it. This psychological trick first essayed by the Romantics has been used time and again by every generation of artists ever since, justifying many an act of flaunting artistic mediocrity just to suggest there is in fact much more than that meets the eye. This trick of the trade runs on our obsession with the artist’s “vision,” “message,” or “mission” next to which the work may well be ancillary. Countless odds and ends of avant-gardish art rely on a sort of gentleman’s agreement which says that this or that scrapyard bit really conveys an “important” vision, or even tangles with the inexpressible, and that to raise any concern of its aesthetic mediocrity is crude and smallminded. Nevertheless, to abstain from such an objection is, I believe, to deprive oneself of an essential understanding of Romanticism as, in fact, an art of waning power—indeed of doubt, mediocrity, and in sum decadence. I will have occasion to enlarge on the causes of this diminishment (especially Chapter 9) whose chief cause is the deregulation of art, which itself derives from the freeing of artistic making: where a work of art is autonomous, the standards by which it is esteemed necessarily stem from it alone, hence have no general, binding force. Creating out of himself, by himself, and often for himself, the poet really only has himself to vouch for his greatness. There is no diploma-conferring academy, no vox communis of tradition or craft wisdom, no governing concept of beauty, excellence, and success to relieve him of self-doubt if self-doubt pays a visit, and it almost always does, with exhausting frequency. Yet before moving on the general picture, let’s consider one last example of Romantic art built around the sense of waning power. William Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” (1804) begins on yet another dirge of lost vision somewhere between Hölderlin’s “I grew up in the arms of the gods” (but am now orphaned) and Coleridge’s “my genial spirits fail.” Wordsworth’s poet premise is that “there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.” The poet has seen his best time come and go and now lives in a kind of permanent aesthetic Lenten. “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” It is as unpromising a poetic premise as one can imagine because it says that one’s visionary genius has died. How is poetry to be worked out of this failure? The answer is, by theorizing this failure and turning poetry into a philosophy of poetry, and art into aesthetics: Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

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We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; . . . In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. Let us stop pining for the primeval radiance and strength, says Wordsworth; instead let us embrace our disenchantment and own and champion it. True art, that is, Romantic art is not made of inspiration and vigor; it is made of losing these, and for lost sublimity and divinity and oneness. Great art isn’t intoxicated; it is miserably sober; it is the “human suffering” that “looks through death.” It, death, is the perspective, the ultimate distance from which art arises—and by death, Wordsworth means mortal awareness, the consciousness of oneself as a separate individual. It is to this individual, this mortal disenchanted theorist of the life lived elsewhere, that Wordsworth’s poem offers his theoretic poem which henceforth is the only poetry that counts: Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. These thoughts—for they are indeed thoughts and not emotional eruptions, thoughts about consciousness, thoughts about art—are the “Immortality Ode” in question. Here, then, is the Romantic bargain: to lose the world in exchange for a theory of the world; to jettison craft for intuitive genius, then drop intuitive genius for a philosophy of art. That this philosophy of art is capable of great art, we have Wordsworth’s ode (and Coleridge’s, and Keats’s, and Hölderlin’s) to prove it. Just the same, this art-as-philosophy-of-art isn’t, by its own admission, the fruit of vigor. It is born of artistic depletion and self-doubt. “I call the classical that which is healthy, and the Romantic that which is sick,” said Goethe, and well, it is true that the Romantic, the nonclassical, the modern tend to be sick with doubt. Theirs is the mannered style of the uncertain, the defensive, and the self-conscious. It is the style of those who seek solace in knowing for their lack of doing. It is, in sum, the nostrum of philosophers, scholars, and historians, of the Hegelians who show up after the heyday only to insist that the heyday starts with them at dusk, when the owl of Minerva awakes. It is the style of those who, having dropped the inherited traditions that agreed on what great art was, are ever unsure of what they are up to. “The hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” of Wordsworth, the lost “beauty-making

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power” of Coleridge: these also mourn a time when artistic excellence was a clear, agreed-upon fact, when beauty was good and simple. But the individualization of art-making (the so-called liberation and autonomy of art) has torn through the aesthetic innocence. Alone with his genius, the artist is care-worn by doubt. The genius of Romanticism was to spin this doubt (the doubt that art can yet be born) into artistic silk. It was to elevate art theory above art-making and insists that an art of self-doubt, an art that theorizes the possibility of art is art still, indeed better and purer art. Therein aesthetic modernity got its blueprint, and its marching orders.

5 The Legend of Freedom

Having briefly described the Romantic catalyst of the legendry of modern art, we can now move to sift its several strands. Our guide in this matter will be the famous short story by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, written in 1831 at the cusp and breaking point of the Romantic fever, The Unknown Masterpiece. Though the historical setting of Balzac’s novella is the seventeenth century, its mentality is very much of the nineteenth. The Unknown Masterpiece is a parable about the tribulations of making art in the modern age and revolves around Frenhofer, a painter of supreme expressive power who falls victim to his own genius. Frenhofer sets his sight on creating the consummate work of art and spends years refining and improving his painted masterpiece. At last he unveils it: it turns out that the best indeed is the enemy of the good. Every brushstroke which he thought went to hone his vision actually befuddled it. His “masterpiece” is a hodgepodge of smears and smudges, a bedlam of paint, an impasto of nonsense. Frenhofer notices the aghast faces of his admirers. He shrugs, he protests, he angrily throws everyone out. But that night he torches his masterpiece, his studio, and hurls himself into the autoda-fé. Thus for the tale. Frenhofer’s fame, for one, has grown larger than its narrative cradle and captured the sympathy of many a real-life artist.1 Paul Cézanne read the short story, smacked his forehead, and declared “Frenhofer, c’est moi” (I am Frenhofer). Gauguin meditated on the story; Zola, Henry James, and Proust picked up its theme, while the poet Rainer Maria Rilke identified Frenhofer with his own “search for the uttermost.” In 1931, The Unknown Masterpiece came out in an edition illustrated by Pablo Picasso who moved his studio to Nº 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, the address where Frenhofer keeps his atelier (to this day a plaque on the door commemorates the double occupancy, real and fictional). Frenhofer is the tutelary spirit of the critical literature on twentieth-century abstraction and Expressionism; his influence is felt in artists as recent as the English painter Richard Hamilton who dedicated one of his last paintings to the story and

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its impossible genius. Frenhofer inspired director Jacques Rivette to bring the story to the silver screen in 1991, and his story has of course occupied the imagination of art critics, philosophers, and writers, among whom Michel Serres, Arthur Danto, and Michel Butor.2 Frenhofer has been named the tutelary father of, variously, Manet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Pollock, and pretty much all of abstract art, Expressionist and not. Balzac, it bears noting, published his tale under the imprint of contes philosophiques, not among his stories of social observation, presumably to impress that he offered therein a serious look into the essence of art in modern times. He seemed to have foreglimpsed that Frenhofer would embody the complex of artistic modernity. Though he lives in the seventeenth century, Frenhofer is very much a product of the Romantic imagination. His sayings are an anthology of Romantic precepts. Thus, his panegyric of poetic genius and denigration of craft-training: “You may know your syntax thoroughly and make no blunders in your grammar, and it takes that and something more to make a great poet.”3 What is that something more? “A nothing,” says Frenhofer, rather typically, “but a nothing that is everything” and therefore requires mystical shoe pads to approach. It is a “daemon,” “a fantastic spirit living in a mysterious world” with “countless vague thoughts in his soul.” One thing for sure is that Frenhofer has it, whatever “it” is which makes him live and breathe “beyond the limits of human nature,” “a passionate enthusiast who sees above and beyond other painters.”4 The latter stipulation is important because without it there falls the absolute sine qua non of Romantic and post-Romantic art, which is that it should be free. “No master can teach you,” says Frenhofer, or else one’s creation is dependent on someone else, and is therefore servile, whereas it is a cornerstone of the Romantic dogma that nothing that is servile can be great, let alone artistic.5 Now, this is not the place to rehearse the history of the idea of freedom and of how it became the index of Western ethics and politics, and the kernel of the life well lived. Together with fairness, liberty undergirds the Western liberal mind’s judgments of right and wrong, welfare and harm. Thus, an action is wrong that harms an individual (rather than an ideal, an abstract community, or a god), and harming an individual means to compromise his or her ability to pursue an autonomous existential project. Again, it would take us too far outside of our topic to review how the harm-to-individualautonomy principle unifies the outlook of Western moral philosophers as varied as Hume, Kant, Bentham, or J. S. Mill. Other moral indexes which had been essential to the sense of the life well lived in group-centered societies (indexes such as loyalty, duty, piety, hierarchy, honor, purity) have dwindled before the oncoming liberal vision (thus named for singling out individual autonomy as the chief goal and standard of human thriving). Though the above is a rough-and-ready summary and much can be said about the local persistence of group-centric moralities in Western life, it must

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do for our purpose of placing modern art in its moral context. In aesthetics, too, the governing principle of good and bad tends to cleave to the liberal vision—a work of art being good to the extent that it has liberated itself from external interferences such as duty and loyalty to a group, a deity, or a non-aesthetic ideal. Good art, it is said, is original, self-driven, and independent and has its purpose within itself. It has thrown off the rusty shackles of the règles assurées of craftsmanship and taste. No master can teach you, says Frenhofer, nor indeed ought to teach you. Such teaching curbs your autonomy and thereby degrades the quality of your art whose virtue (i.e., self-respect and strength) derives from independence. Throw away, therefore, all “syntax” and “grammar,” all “formulae” and “rules,” and become “poets,” Frenhofer enthuses. “I am . . . more of a poet than a painter!” he boasts: he invents and does not copy, he genuinely creates and does not imitate (cf. the Greek word “poiesis,” to make something that did not exist before). Since the unmastered artist does not work according to model, he will also throw off the old yoke of representation and reality: “The aim of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. You are not a servile copyist, but a poet!” Frenhofer reminds pupils.6 No doubt there is a contradiction in this reminder. The very command (“be a poet!”) invalidates itself, which is why the legend of artistic freedom feeds contradiction and neurotic entanglement. To speak only of The Unknown Masterpiece, it is a totem pole of master-and-bondsman gradation. (Poussin looks up in despair to the elder Porbus who looks up in despair to Frenhofer who looks up in awe to his own quasi-mythical master Mabuse.) No one is ever free enough in the kingdom of freedom, and the legend of artistic freedom is more a desideratum than an actionable state of affairs. “I deny that art can be taught,” proclaimed the painter Courbet in fine Frenhoferish form: “Every artist must be his own master.”7 Such talk becomes legion in the wake of Romanticism (and echoes in the classroom of many a Master of Fine Arts program today). In reality Courbet didn’t do so badly taking lessons in Besançon and copying masters at the Louvre, nor did his peers who, up into the early twentieth century, all trained in the atelier-studio-academy curriculum of technique. As a theory of creation, artistic freedom was a legend in the fictive sense of the term for most of the nineteenth century. But the thing about legends is that they have a way of begetting realities, and the legend of freedom finally becomes a reality-making force around 1900 when a vanguard of artists acted on Courbet’s rallying cry and stepped up vowing to forget the little practical training they had (the primitivist, Gauguin stage of avant-gardism) or systematically contravene its rudiments. Everywhere art was in chains; everywhere it yearned to be free, and those chains fell one after the other—academic rules, then craft, then decorum, then polish, then representation, then the public—or at any rate the idea that an artist creates with the gratification of people in mind. Evoking “that sordid necessity of living for others,” Oscar Wilde baronially declared that “an

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individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes . . . cannot put into his work what is best in him.”8 The notion is absurd on its face (or else Fra Angelico, Shakespeare, Raphael, Bach, The Beatles, Frank Gehry, et. al., didn’t do their best), but the idea (wiz., that a genuine artist is free of her public’s expectations) is so much part of the legend of brave freedom that any breach of it makes a painter or musician or writer suspect of being a “sell-out.” “There is no ‘must’ in art because art is free,” said the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1911.9 No artistic past, no knowledge, no expectation, no public—the free artist is ideally as blank a slate as her page or canvas. “I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation,” said the Russian avant-gardist Kasimir Malevich.10 “Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void,” said Paul Klee. Ditto Matisse, “When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise. . . . Starting to paint I felt gloriously free.” “To Confine the Artist Is a Crime, It Means Murdering Unborn Life” is the title of an early self-portrait of Egon Schiele. “Artistic imagination must remain free,” stated the Surrealist André Breton. And Picasso, “To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.”11 “Never join an organization,” his friend Braque recommended.12 One could write an anthology out of such sayings, which begin at a trickle in the Renaissance, then flow amply by the time of Benvenutto Cellini and Giordano Bruno, then thick and fast in the age of Diderot (“the rules have helped the ordinary man; they have injured the man of genius”), and finally in full flood after Romanticism.13 *

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Yet, as the existentialist will tell you, freedom is a heavy burden. Another anthology could be written on the freedom blues. “Being able to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know how to be free,” André Gide said, and this summarizes the quandary of the newly liberated artist.14 What is he or she to do with so much freedom? In what direction to strike? Where all paths are equally open for travel, none seems more worthwhile than the others. As Wordsworth laments, “Me this unchartered freedom tires; / I feel the weight of chance-desires.”15 Absent any jury, absent any court of appeal, how can one be sure to be on the right track, and to have done good work. One only has one’s self-conviction in the end, and that is so terribly shaky. To understand modern art, we need to consider not only the exhilarating but also crippling aspects of freedom. The children of Frenhofer knew plenty about the evils of rule observance—conformity, tedium, banality, and so on. Yet once the helium bubble of liberation popped, they who refused “rules,” “formulae,” and teachers still faced the day-to-day business of making art, and they quickly discovered, or remembered, that rules aren’t just impedimenta; they are also spring boards. Models of craft and form

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sketch out a landscape of possibilities, possibilities which rely on borders to function as possibilities. It is telling that, no sooner freed from the usual tyrannies (like representation), newly emancipated artists like Malevich or Mondrian imposed on themselves axiomatic rules of geometry and nonrepresentation; or that, like the futurists and Surrealists, they issued one manifesto after another legislating what could and could not be done inside their respective movements, and under pain of excommunication. How not to see in the monotonous geometry of Malevich’s Black Square, Red Square, Black Circle, and so on, an escape from the hell of freedom where there is no right and wrong, no high and low, and no definite criterion to distinguish success from error? At least Black Square restores unimpeachable standards of appreciation. Is Black Square black and square, yes or no? It is indeed. The aim and rule which it set for itself have been unquestionably met. Breaking out of the madness of no-right and no-wrong, and by the new algorithmic standards of artistic achievement, Malevich may have the satisfaction of being the most indubitably successful artist there ever lived. The cost, of course, is a sharp lowering of the bar of achievement. *

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Before this outcome, however, freedom posed a problem, and for a portrait of the quandary of freedom, we return to Balzac’s Frenhofer, the artist who without the compass of tradition knows not how far he has gone, how he got there, and whither to go, at sea in aesthetic laisser-faire, in the vastness of no rule, of anomie. So Frenhofer works frenziedly to perfect his masterpiece. But is he making headway or moving backward? Armed with personal intuition only (minus “syntax,” “grammar,” “formulae,” and “rules”), how can he be sure of having progressed? He may have discovered a new continent; but he could very well be digging himself into a hole. Rules enable us to gauge the gap between what we intend to do and what we do. They show what challenges have been overcome, and what obstacles still stand in the way. These victories and setbacks are the stuff of apprenticeship, which consists of passing through the feedback loops of failure and learning from one’s missteps. But a fateful clause of the artistic pact with freedom is that it takes away the conditions of failure, but by the same token the criteria of success. The anomic artist is in darkness with no clear way forward, nor up or down. Then it dawns on him that when error is eliminated, so too is excellence. Goethe guessed that the free-for-all of Romanticism spelled “the coming of a barbarous age.” “And we are already in its midst,” he said, “for wherein does barbarism consist but the failure to recognize the excellent?”16 Such sayings are legion in the nineteenth century (Leopardi, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Renan, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky), not all from the mouth of traditionalists, and Frenhofer lives in this barbarism: it is the “dim

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formless fog” of his lacking a criterion of rightness and wrongness to assess his own painting. While he “sees above and beyond other painters” he in fact does not know what he is looking at, indeed whether he is looking at anything at all. This doubt is splashed all over his masterpiece—the welter of smudges and streaks and daubs which shows that much has been done, and nothing conclusively achieved. Romanticism is achievement anxiety. Thus, Frenhofer’s litany, “And yet—I am not satisfied; I have misgivings”; “I have doubts about my work”; “something still remains for me to do”; “Ah if I could but be sure.”17 This dirge of doubt is heard among all the manumitted heirs of Frenhofer from Delacroix all the way to the New York Romantics of the 1950s (Pollock, Rothko, Arshile Gorky, etc.) Here is Cézanne a year before his death: “Shall I ever reach the goal so eagerly sought and so long pursued? I hope so, but so long as it has not been attained a vague feeling of discomfort persists which will not disappear until I have gained the harbor—that is, until I shall have accomplished something more promising than what has gone before.”18 Promise is logically most of what an emancipated work of art can offer—lest it congeal into a formula. Even progress (which ironically justified Romantic freedom) must vanish without the landmarks to map the journey. On the one hand, the self-ruled artist is spared the shame of failure; on the other, he discovers he can never be sure of having done right. Frenhofer is not only beyond censure, to be sure, but also beyond consecration. He never does wrong, but he never does right either—not irrefutably. If his suicide is a hint, it is a hint that the Romantic artist secretly misses the old culture of standards without which all seems to be turmoil and disquiet. Modernism apparently outgrows this Weltschmerz for whereas Frenhofer dies in rage and shame, the Modernist doubter who loses his way flaunts his doubt: I know not where I go, and this is as it should be. Romantic liberation theory eased into the pseudo-profound nonjudgmentalism of the democratic age when, for example, Clement Greenberg (the Diderot of the American century) could be heard saying that on the difference between good art and bad “there are criteria but they can’t be put into words.”19 Ditto the go-to aesthetic philosopher of the 1960s Nelson Goodman who judged that “judging the excellence of works of art . . . is not the best way of understanding them.”20 The total freedom of the artistic act demands no less: for “good” and “bad” assumes there is an external standard to which a work of art can be held, and that may have constrained and spoiled its spontaneous effusion and thereby degraded its art. This philosophy goes back to the avant-garde of the 1910s, to the art-desperado Marcel Duchamp who declared that “art may be bad, good, or indifferent, but whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art.”21 Art is art no matter what it does; what matters is that it does, and whoever would pass a judgment of aptitude or value or achievement has seriously failed to comprehend the Romantic ideology of the self-ruled work of art which

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logically can only be “liked” or “disliked,” as on social media, for reasons which, dixit Greenberg, pass explanation. The unmotivated aimless act of doing—of doing for the sake of doing, as a way of manifesting one’s freedom—comes into its own most spectacularly in the “gratuitous” acts of Surrealist art and poetry (Joan Miró washing his brushes over his canvas to start with interesting random spots of turpentine) and in Abstract Expressionism (the ecstatically flung painting of Jackson Pollock). Yet, even then freedom is no free ride. It is good, after all, to know where you go right and where you go wrong, and as some emancipated artists admitted, it is good to be part of a comity of spirit. Says the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko: “There is no longer one truth, no single authority. Today instead of one voice, we have dozens. . . . Each pulls the artist this way and that . . .. Where could he find peace in this Babel?”22 How much artists fled this Babel, even as they waved its flag, is shown both outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly, in the tendency toward a shared style called Abstract Expressionism; inwardly, in the tendency toward repetition and self-imitation. On this score, it bears remarking that the freest artists in Western art have produced some of its most predictable works, serial statements wherein the artist sought refuge from the wilderness of freedom. Everything is allowed, but in what direction should I go? What to do next? “And the spoilt child, the modern painter, says to himself: ‘what is this imagination they talk about? Something dangerous and tiring.’”23 Wearisome is freedom indeed, which, once it runs down all obstacles, has no obstacle left to jump, and grows vague and listless. First among Frenhofer’s children, Claude Monet noticed how soon the ship of freedom starts tacking in circles: “I really don’t know how to make headway with a painting anymore. I feel as if I were doing the same thing every day without getting anywhere.”24 Luckily Monet could count on nature to pull him on. Not so the post-figurative painters who flounder in their boundless freedom and repeat themselves—artists like Pollock, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and of course Rothko, the most tragically repetitive of them all. Andy Warhol sought to trick this monotony by championing it, but this merely proves the point: flaunting repetition is no solution to the problem of freedom; it merely gilds the cage. One can practically hear the neoExpressionist imploring his brush to surprise him. This is half the drama of Pollock’s ferocious gyrations or Franz Kline’s cut-and-run slathers in which we behold the painter trying to outwit himself. Often this outwitting sought the recourse of the unconscious that supposed wild child to whom Abstract Expressionists clung with desperate hope. But the wild child soon turned out to be a crusty old fellow, made of old sediments, set in his automatic ways. For a good reason did the French Surrealists call stream-of-consciousness writing l’écriture automatique. Whatever freedom you gain by unhooking from the helm of reason, you surrender to the automatic pilot of instinct,

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and there is no freedom in that. Which indeed may be the point, for there is no more troublesome gift than freedom. *

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The Unknown Masterpiece foresees the paradoxes of freedom. Freewheeling Frenhofer has been stuck for years on one painting. In the absence of external authority to tell him when and where his creative freedom gets to alight, his sublime venture continues interminably. He paints and doubts and paints his doubt and doubts his paint, and the doubt finally does him in. A Romantic though he be, he remains an old-fashioned artist, one who needs to know (this is the fateful meaning of his masterpiece being inconnu, “unknown”). Wracked by doubt, Frenhofer burns his painting and kills himself, proving that he is a classical soul after all. For only a classical artist acts out the logic of his doubt: Virgil on his deathbed asked his friends to burn his flawed Aeneid; dying Kafka called for a similar fate on his entire, yet unpublished oeuvre. Michelangelo burned hundreds of his own drawings; and Monet saw that at least thirty of his water lilies paintings went into the fire. Apparently Monet was quite the arsonist. “Last autumn, I burned six canvases. . . . I am constantly haunted by what I’m trying to achieve.”25 It may be that by the late nineteenth century the burning of canvas had acquired a holy smell of Sisyphean quest and Icarean glory. Given the cost of a canvas, and it is more likely that an impecunious artist would have scraped the paint off and started anew, but this of course is less inspiring than an auto-da-fé in the name of a quest. Frenhofer made heavy weather of his quest, which he terminated with his admitted failure and death. His followers in real life were less likely to submit to this stringent test, but instead extracted a subsidiary legend out of the interminable search: the legend of the unfinished. In truth, Frenhofer needn’t have died for his doubt; he could have gloried in it. All artists struggle; but at no time until the Romantic era did they start struggling with such ado and public demonstration. “I am doing the same thing every day without getting anywhere. . . . I assure you, I worry that I am burnt out, used up,” moaned Monet. And it goes on, “This is the third day on which I haven’t been able to paint! You can imagine how it torments me”; “Hard as I work, I can’t finish anything; there are only pictures I can’t do anything more with, and they remain incomplete.”26 Such talk becomes rather a badge of seriousness and dedication in the period. Cézanne spent forty years on his Baigneuses and never finished it. He sighed that everything he and his contemporaries “make is fragmentary” and that “we are no longer capable of composition.”27 Denied the help of composition technique, Gauguin wondered, “Where does the execution of a painting begin and where does it end?”28 The jeremiad was in fact a self-addressed compliment of artists who turned the indeterminate to advantage and made a full-on

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style of it, already well-practiced by the Romantics (Delacroix, Constable, Turner), then consecrated by Impressionism and the early moderns (Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne): the unfinished statement. “Great gods! What will it be when the last brushstroke is finally added?” exclaimed a wag sizing up a Monet at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877.29 It is a jibe, but not off the mark: the Impressionists indeed did make a virtue of the lack of finish. It was first of all a mark of realism, since nature never presents itself in a neat package, all wrapped up and complete and unchanging. It was also a philosophical choice having to do with being genuinely modern (etymologically, “of the now”), hence unfinished, in the moment, sur le vif. “If it is impossible, it is impossible, but I’m going to try it even though I don’t know how it ought to be done. Even I don’t know how I paint it, I just sit down. . . . I look at what is in front of my eyes, and I say to myself: that white board has got to turn into something—I come back dissatisfied,” said Van Gogh.30 Here was the emancipated artist, the wolf-child of art history; but here was also the artist who turns indeterminacy into sublimity. To stay with Van Gogh: “An artist . . . : it’s self-evident that what word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It’s the very opposite of saying ‘I know all about it, I’ve already found it.’”31 The less you find, the more artistic you are. And the more unknowing the masterpiece, the brighter its star. Frenhofer’s tragic incompetence becomes a certificate of excellence. The Modernist is an artist because he does not find. Van Gogh again: “I’m well aware one cannot say ‘I know how to do a portrait’ without telling a lie because that is an infinite objective.”32 Thus the unfinished casts off the rags of misfortune and dons the starry sky. Incompletion is profound, cosmic, mystical; it is infinity. Being the unfinished, which really is the trademark style of modernity, is the Romantic glorification of the work of art as fragment—a fragment of boundless nature and of the boundless soul within.33 Coleridge, Schlegel, Leopardi lauded the fragment-poem; artists executed it in paint and stone— vehemently stressing the underpainted passage, the suspended line, the frenzied stroke, the quizzical framing cut (Delacroix, Turner, Manet, Degas, etc.). Aristotle said that art finishes what nature leaves incomplete. No more. Romantic modernity leaves art ajar, even if that means creating a picture less pleasing, less picturesque than a picture will be simply by virtue of having borders. “One always has to spoil a picture a little bit in order to finish it,” said Eugène Delacroix, who understood that the unfinished style runs counter to the very idea of a picture, which is to create a totality.34 But the taste of modernity was for paradox, and one had to be an unmannered fool to produce a conclusion, as Flaubert said. From thereon the moderns practiced not to finish their sentence, to choke a musical line in mid-breath, and to dress a painting in flurries of brushwork as every Fauvist, Expressionist, Tachist, Vorticist, action painter, kinetic or performance artist, and anyone

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who abides by the sketch-and-process prescription of modern art has done ever since. “Do no finish your work too much,” Gauguin advised.35 There is no line thereafter which fails to fray, blur, or bleed; not a form that fails to be raw, or a verse that isn’t blank and blunt. Drawing grown indistinguishable from poetry is gnomic, performance improvised, and music interruptive. “Woe to you the day it is said that you are finished! To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul—to give it its final blow; the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture,” says Picasso.36 The unfinished comes to a head in the American Spring, Summer, and Fall of Romanticism that was Abstract Expressionism. “When something is finished, that means it is dead, doesn’t it?” said Arshile Gorky; “I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting. I just stop working on it for a while.”37 Ditto Willem de Kooning, “I refrain from finishing.”38 Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse a work of art to completion. Art is life, and therefore process, momentum, energy. *

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As an offshoot of Romantic art, Modernism wishes to reinject mystery into a supposedly disenchanted, rationalized, bureaucratized world. To the barrens of completion, the modern substituted the lush dim forest of half-glimpsed possibilities. And over the foretold finality of composition, it offers the wonderful futurity of deconstruction. Artistic closure smacks of tradition-bound society; the Romantically unfinished, of the progressive, forward-looking, basically optimistic spirit of science and liberal humanism. Clement Greenberg said that the real subject matter of action painting “is the artist’s individual possibilities”—which, according to the gospel of personal empowerment, is the purpose of social life.39 Not by coincidence did the unfinished style triumph in Manhattan-bred Abstract Expressionism, in the land of Emerson and Thoreau and libertarian go-it-alone. There Braque’s motto that “it’s the act of painting, not the finished painting” begot a style of its own, which the critic Arnold Rosenberg named action painting in 1952.40 Focused on the gesture, action painting seeks to be art-making without a cause, and with no end in sight—a microcosm of America escaping the nightmare of European history and writing the interminable future on the blank canvas of a new world. “The artist accepts as real only that which is in in the process of creating,” Rosenberg enthused.41 “An Action Painting is a free act, by which . . . the act is not determined by its previous moves any more than it is from the outside, and remains open to a new choice.”42 Action painting is the American oblivion artist in ecstasy, the entrepreneur in glory; it is Henry Ford’s “history is bunk” in paint, and not by coincidence did the State Department pick Jackson Pollock, Motherwell, and Kooning

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(not Edward Hopper, not Milton Avery, not Andrew Wyeth) to showcase the virtues of the free market in the “Advancing American Art” international touring show. In Pollock, liberalism declares itself in all its Rousseauistic innocence, skipping rocks and drawing ripples on the glass of Walden Pond. Some, of a more radical bent, even claimed that the unfinished action style was a way of subverting the establishment.43 Of the many legends of modern art, this must be the most hopeless. In truth, the unfinished style glamorizes the modern middle-class optimistic wager on the yet-to-be; it is the liberal credo of progress made visible. In this respect, the unfinished does get the job done: it celebrates us. *

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It remains that the unfinished is a legend in the fictive sense—a fallacy. An unfinished picture is a picture still; an incomplete poem is the poem it is meant to be. That an artist feels unable to “find in full,” to use Van Gogh’s phrase, is irrelevant to the resulting artifact. Gorky’s “I never finish a painting” is false: he, no less than Raphael, finished as many paintings as he sent to the varnisher. However sketchy and ragged it looks, a painting is finished the moment it is hung for sale. I believe in process, in “everlastingness,” says the Manhattan Expressionist. This does nothing to undo the fact there is no such thing as an infinite human endeavor, hence no such thing as an indefinite or interminable work of art. A Monet is as finished as the slickest Boucher. This is why the remark (“what will it be when the last brushstroke is finally added?”) worked as an Impressionist joke: because the painting has in fact had its last brushstroke, however much it pretends to look expectant. No work of art is intentionally unfinished—that is a contradiction in terms. A work of art (this may be its private tragedy) always puts all its cards on the table. The last word of a poem rings over it like a funerary knell. Though the intention be boundless, the realization is always bounded. It is a foible of Romanticism to have confused intention with realization. Our job is to disentangle the knot. A work of art whose aim is indefinite is not perforce infinite. But perhaps the consummate paradox of the legend of the unfinished is that it became an imperative, a style, the overarching style of modernity even. A style is by definition a default mode. It is to art what an armchair is to the human body: a groove, a catchment of easing tensions, a settlement. On the one hand, the legend of the unfinished is one of the more fruitful of Modernism; on the other hand, this very fruitfulness is a contradiction of the legend itself insofar as it champions freedom. As soon as a work of art is expected to seem unfinished, when it is a foregone stylistic fact that a work of art should be open-ended, the unfinished becomes as closed a form as the “finish” of classical art. This paradox puts paid to it: the unfinished is the classical style of the classic-hating classical modern.

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This, of course, is not to gainsay its cultural relevance. As we have seen, the unfinished ties into certain ideas about personal freedom which, for the artist, means that nothing should compel him to bind or confine his expressive flow. Only he, a consummate libertarian, can say where or whether it ends, and he is romantically averse to constraint. Thus, the legend of the unfinished leads us to look into its associated legend of the autonomous artist.

6 The Legend of the Artist

This legend is pervasive and well attested. It began, as we have seen, in the late Renaissance when the merchant-craftsman carved for himself some “liberties” against his aristocratic patron (comparable to those by which his city-dwelling brothers and sisters safeguarded their business against baronial predation). With Romanticism, the artist gave this anti-patron independence a halo of sanctity woven of mystic-philosophical filigrees: a true work of art is a monad, self-ruled universe, a kingdom of free self-determination, and so on. The extravagance of these claims, first emitted by Kant then patented by the German Idealist school, tells us how much the artist sought guarantees from the incoming new boss who replaced princely patronage: the masspublic world of publishers, book buyers, art shows, concours, and so on. Here was a ubiquitous, majoritarian power, a “tyranny of the majority,” to which the artist opposed his insurrection of the singularity, that is, the legend of the self-ruled work of art which is reprised at regular intervals from Aestheticism, Symbolism, Art-for-Art’s Sake, via Cubism all the way to Abstract Expressionism, and from Gautier to Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, Proust, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. That artistic autonomy is fantasy brooks little doubt (though, as I have argued, artistic ideas live by their charm, not consistency). Here is one of its classical formulations by novelist E. M. Forster in the 1930s. Each work of art, Forster says, is a “universe that (1) only answers to its own laws, (2) supports itself, (3) internally coheres, and (4) has a new standard of truth.”1 In fact, all but one of these precepts overstate their claims. Pace (1), no work of art is a universe answering to its own laws only, or else it would be either imperceptible or unintelligible to human beings. In fact a work of art reflects the place and time of its begetting, as well as the psychology and morality of its maker and of its time. Pace (2) is debunked by the simple fact that no work of art exists without a beholder. Pace (3) is true insofar as a work of art isn’t a random outburst, but its internal coherence isn’t independent of public externalities of taste and reason. Finally, Pace (4) depends very much on what semantic leeway is taken with

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the word “truth.” There are scientific truths, moral truths, historical truths, and spiritual truths. But truth as such does not admit of “new standards.” Truth’s only standard is whether it accurately reports and describes an order of things. At most, Pace (4) simply says a good work of art unveils new facets of reality. This is hardly rewriting the book on truth. If logic debunks the legend of self-rule, utility rescues it. And its chief utility was to empower the artist against the public, his new tyrant, all the while giving him an edge to compete in the novelty-mad commercial age (see Chapter 11). Self-rule is, as we have seen (Chapter 5), a heavy burden. For what is a self-given rule if not arbitrariness? And what is arbitrariness if not uncertainty? Here we meet the heirs of Frenhofer, each not only sovereign in his kingdom but also terribly rootless, racked by doubt. Clearly, an addendum to the legend of the autonomous artist was needed. Cue in the legend of the essential artist. As we have seen, the legend of the artist goes back to the Renaissance, but its apogee took place under Romanticism. Sociologically speaking, the rise of artists is but one story in the larger epic of professionalizing society— of the historical shift from a society of warriors and religious intercessors to a society of makers and inventors. The job of artists, of course, is to produce images, to conjure up would-be worlds and creatures, to tell stories, and to compose poems and songs. As such, and as Plato scornfully pointed out, they are craftsmen. In a society that glorifies producers—and glorifies those of titanic world-changing achievements like industrialists, engineers, inventors, and so on—a craftsman is really no special figure. To convince society that he isn’t just another maker, he must wrap his trade in mystique through which his kind of making seems rare, spiritual, akin to the magic that was once the preserve of kings and priests. Enter the legend of the essential, indefinable artist. This is a good place to return to The Unknown Masterpiece at the moment when Frenhofer unveils his legendary chef-d’oeuvre that is a mess of wales and smudges. “Where is art? Art has vanished, it is invisible!” Frenhofer raves in front of his wall of paint. He, it should be inferred, speaks as a dyed-in-the-wool realist who thinks he has so well honed his picture as to look one and the same with its model (“art has vanished,” he says). But his devotees hear something else entirely. “Do you know that in him we see a very great painter?” they say pointing to his so-called masterpiece. “There lies the limit of our art on earth.” To them, Frenhofer’s sublime quest, his leap beyond rules, his endless exploration—it is art supreme. It doesn’t matter that the quest yields a varicolored stew. The “search,” the venture, the intention, the onwardness—in sum, the artist’s state of mind—this is art supreme. As for the work of art, well, it can well be a Rorschach blot, indeed it is allowed to fall by the wayside. In fact, the more inconclusive and abortive it looks, the higher the chances that it was created by “a very great painter,” yea, standing at “the very limit of our art on earth.”

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Artists began by casting off tradition; then academies; then nature; finally, they jettisoned the artwork itself. But lo and behold! This overcoming of art was their consecration. In essence, it took four decades between establishing the Romantic church of art and spiriting away the object of this cult. This legerdemain spans the declaration that art is self-ruled and the news that it is independent even from artistic manifestations, hence that the artist transcends his productions. Here the art-for-art’s sake reveals its true mission, which was never for the sake of art but for the sake of whoever calls himself an artist. The Frenhoferists are no martyrs to art at all. It is not they who sacrifice themselves to art, but art that gets sacrificed to them. Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece saw it all coming (as did, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs in which a painter never finishes a Venus but calls it perfect nevertheless). However, it is really in the late nineteenth century, in the days of Henry James, that the legend of the arttranscending artist locks into place. Henry James returned often to the figure of the artist, notably in his short fiction—in novellas like “The Story of a Masterpiece,” “A Landscape Painter,” “Flickerbridge,” “The Aspern Papers,” “The Liar,” “The Madonna of the Future,” or “The Middle Years.” The latter is of particular interest. “The Middle Years,” from 1893, tells of a great novelist named Dencombe who late in life comes to understand that “he had done all that he should ever do, and yet had not done what he wanted.” Only now, on his deathbed, does he understand what he wanted. He “sees”—but it’s too late. He gasps, “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Hence the title, “The Middle Years”: they are the interim of anomie, of anarchy, of a promise postponed. Inside the interim, the artist is safe. His doubt, which Dencombe confesses on his deathbed, his despair which he readily admits—none of it count against him. On the contrary, James puts a devotee of Dencombe at his bedside to deliver the encomium: —“If you’ve doubted, if you’ve despaired, you’ve always ‘done’ it,” his visitor subtly argued. —“We’ve done something or other,” Dencombe conceded. —“Something or other is everything. It’s the feasible. It’s you!” —“Comforter!” poor Dencombe ironically sighed.2 Dencombe despairs of aesthetic satisfaction. Never mind, says his admirer: this dissatisfaction is what you have done. But what I have done is paltry, counters the dying artist. That paltriness is your glory, retorts the apologist. It’s “the feasible,” literally, what-can-be-done. But how does the autonomous artist know what can be done when he has no notion of what cannot be done or isn’t worth doing? Indeed he cannot know, and because somehow the admirer (or James) suspects it, he shifts his apologetics to the theology

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of identity-absolutes: “It’s you!” Nothing that you have done could possibly be wanting because you are an artist. If asked to explain what being an artist means, Romantic authenticity comes to the rescue: it consists of being you. Thus, the neo-aristocratic mystique clicks into place: you are you, this “youness” is what artists epitomize, and the haze-like indeterminacy around this you-ness and its achievements, well, that is “everything”: it is art. We could say that “art” here means simply the ideology of freedom taken to its logical extremity where freedom means not doing anything for fear of limiting one’s options. It means keeping to the feasible and out of the trying field of actuality. I call this sort of art “aristocratic” because it assumes that no empirical rebuke, no public test of trial and error, no show of poor performance or incompetence can demote an artist from his podium. In this patrician safe space, the artist can well disdain the bourgeois trade of give-and-take, of public failure-and-recalibration, of, in the end, civic modesty. Art is like the monarch who, however spotty or vacuous his rule, never ceases to be the very special “you”—special for not having to prove anything in particular. The rest, as James says with telling dismissal, is “the madness of art,” that is, the novels, poems, paintings, and sculptures which, like apophatic scriptures, glow with the absent god. In sum, the “our-doubt-is-our-task” ministry substitutes art for our yearning for it. This substitution is a trick familiar to prophetic creeds, the charm of which is not lost on modern art. The more it is yearned for, the more the yet-unrealized work of art (the “Madonna of the Future” of James’s other short story) accrues power and reality. God’s mystery is not a problem to transcendental religion: on the contrary it proves his existence. The less we comprehend the deity, the more he absolutely is. Modern art performs the same sleight of hand: if it doesn’t look like art or looks to have gone terribly wrong, as in Frenhofer’s painting, or if it proclaims it is only lesser art, as Dencombe says, then it must mean that we are dealing with a genuine artist. *

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It goes without saying that this trick works only in the purely theoretic endeavors of culture (religion, philosophy, art). No engineer, no physician, no scientist, hopefully no historian could get away with saying that his nonachievements prove that he is onto something good. In truth, artists in the nineteenth century, not even the Romantics, would not have got away with it had they tried. Up until 1900, to use a round date, artists abided by certain expectations of apprenticeship, craft, study, technical mastery, applied work, and achievement. Most importantly they answered to a public that had not yet learned to cower under the charge of philistinism. Public salons and concerts, national and regional contests, the necessity of retailing one’s works of art to the buying public (the age of the National Endowment for the Arts recipient and campus-kept poet had not yet

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dawned) maintained the feedback loop between civil society and artists. For all their self-aggrandizement, artists had to produce the goods and speak to eyes and ears and minds that had not yet surrendered the equally healthy notion (healthy for artists) that art-makers are there to talk to, and not silence, the everyday person. This system collapsed in the twentieth century when the middle class was priced out of the art market, and an assumption took hold that if the artist doesn’t speak to the middle class, then that in itself must be a good thing. Of course, the affluent class has always driven the art market, but this affluent class has not always favored a kind of art decidedly designed to put off the supposedly middle-class values of civility, cordiality, craft, and learning. The art purchased by an English baronet of 1750 was one that his butler or steward could also appreciate. This is hardly the case with the twentieth-century business aristocracy (the Peggy Guggenheims, Charles Saatchis, Eli Broads, François Pinaults, etc.), which marks its distinction by patronizing a high-handed, petulant, impulsive, esoteric art that mocks middle-class understatement. It has been a long time since gentleness and modesty graced the walls of the modern art gallery. Learned craft has given way to the high-pitched numinous statement by which the elite declares its disdain of the bourgeois ethos of manufacture and production. The non-paintings, post-sculptures, and theoretical projects of modern-day Frenhofers and Dencombes—artists about whom we are to know that they think hard about art—glorify the source of wealth in modern societies, which rests in the specialized manipulation of symbols and communications. Unapologetically arcane, the modern work of art makes a mystique of a technocracy whose judgment and wisdom is beyond the common run. On the one hand, their art is beyond articulate judgment (“criteria [that] can’t be put into words”); on the other, some judgment has obviously taken place to decree that this, rather than that, work of art makes it into the New York Museum of Modern Art. But this judgment is not publicly available. It is esoteric, an oracle, an authority we must take on trust. Whatever else may be said about it, modern art isn’t a liberal-minded project. Authoritarian indeed is self-ruled art, which makes every utterance into a decree. Where self-expression is deemed a virtue, the expresser is always right. Gone is the sense that art involves apprenticeship that humbly and bravely requires reckoning with setbacks and shortfalls. Post avant-garde, the gap between intention and accomplishment narrows to a hairline fracture. Merely to declare oneself an artist is to make art, and the road to success isn’t so much art-making as art-mongering. It consists of possessing the marketing skills and public-relations chutzpa to create buzz. It is the skill of manipulating centers of commercial communication. The Dadaists and Surrealists were past-masters at this self-dramatization, so well indeed that their announcements, placards, and pamphlets are studied as art proper rather than its promise. If it was “happening,” then something must have

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happened, never mind quite what it was. The neo-artist need only be famous for being an artist: Salvador Dalí understood this ahead of the curve, and the stepchildren of Warhol have followed suit. An artist is well-advised to double as an impresario, curator, show organizer, and public-relations professional. “Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his tongue,” Matisse once said, and well, contemporary artists would be thin on the ground if they took his advice.3 That art schools and art-studio departments nowadays assign marketing courses on a par with drawing, and art theory ahead of applied training, underscores this point: art is art talk, and art talk is first and foremost the skill of talking others into seeing you as an artist. Renown is what the artist must be most watchful of curating, because his products may not speak for him or even for themselves. An artist today needs to face no difficulty in making art. Technique fades out of mind after 1955, is irrelevant to Pop Art, nugatory in conceptual art, barely traceable in minimalism and conceptualism, and now commonly outsourced to workshop technicians. Gallery palaver aside, it is in fact not hard to make or imagine a Warhol, a Clifford Still, a Donald Judd, let alone a Joseph Kosuth, as indeed it was easy to produce a Dada limerick or a readymade. If and when manufacturing itself, that is, the imparting of mind on matter, requires skill, the job is hired out to unnamed artisans. As with Warhol, so with Hirst, Koons, Murakami, and so on: these neo-artists with clean hands manage teams of actual artists who, because they do not own the brand, go unrecognized. Brand ownership is the real aura of avant-garde works. A perfectly identical copy of a Rembrandt or Velasquez is, it seems to me, as enjoyable as the original. Not so a perfectly identical copy of a Warhol or a Koons. There, value depends on the artist’s aura, that is, on his ownership of the monetizing of his fame. Absent the copyright, the magic dries up and the eye grows cold. If an artist cannot fail at the making of art, it remains that she can very well fail at the job of managing renown. When that happens, she has no oeuvre to stop the depreciating slump. The bubble bursts, the buzz goes out of the name, and the brand (say, Julian Schnabel in 1987) suddenly trades at a fraction of its former market value. No appeal to aesthetic value can cushion the fall. Ultimately, the weakness of renown art is that it isn’t the artist who makes the art but they who, above him, control the renown and the market—the collectors and blue-ribbon gallerists who act in place of the princely patrons and royal administrators of olden days. If Saatchi il magnifico wants to eradicate an artist (like, for example, Sandro Chia), he does not take the art to task; he simply sells his entire stock of works by the luckless painter. The bottom instantly drops out on the brand value, dealers walk away, and the art, robbed of magic and dumbfounded, sinks into obscurity. That, not mediocrity, is the nemesis of modern art. *

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Still, there hangs a cloud over post-achievement art—a reproof that wafts over from the age of craft and whispers that success has come at the cost of cheapening itself. “He who has not felt the difficulties of his art does nothing of value,” said the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Baptiste Chardin.4 Where you can never fail (whether because the standards of good and bad “can’t be put into words” or because achievement and finish are irrelevant to the mix), there a nagging insecurity takes hold, a secret pining for the dignity once conferred by mastery. Where failure is never certain, neither is success. The Romantic and post-Romantic artist lives in this vestibule of hell which, according to Dante, is set aside for those souls that never took a side and never declared themselves. On the surface, the artist carries on with the aplomb of someone whose sense of self-worth does not wait on the opinion of others. Privately, he is racked by this internal drift, which he whispers to his personal diaries, his letters, sometimes his imaginary projections—his Frenhofers and Dencombes. The Romantics de-defined art, and so removed the social verdict of ascertainable failure; but somehow failure wormed its way back from the inside in the form of disquiet and doubt.5 One solution, as we have seen, was to romanticize failure. Frenhofer was invented to give a Faustian veneer to fiasco: success is easy; only the bravest of the brave face the impossible. Besides, we all succeed in the agreed-upon ways: success has a stink of conformity. Failure, on the contrary, is a spanner in the works, a breakout performance, a hiccup on the face of propriety. As Herman Melville said, “It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.”6 A Romantic is someone who, all things considered, would rather take Frenhofer’s grandiose miscarriage over a dutiful Chardinesque product. Whatever Frenhofer did, at least he did it his way. But something else endeared failure to the Romantic generation: it ran contrary to the ordinary mentality of go-getting, Whiggish hustle and bustle, progressivism, scientific breakthroughs, upward social mobility, commercial expansion. Progress indeed had created a new stigma. Where aristocratic society mocked social-climbing, democracy scorned those who stumbled in the game of advancement. In the century of expanding opportunities, the absence of success became a moral flaw—indolence, shiftlessness, stupidity. “Failure,” which once described only events, now stigmatized persons: sucker, flunky, bust, flap, dud, also-ran, never-was, born loser, and so on.7 This vilification is what, a contrarian at heart, the Romantic turned into honor. That which the industrious bourgeoisie acclaimed, the artistic set would disdain; and what the establishment scorned, the art world would exalt. “The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS is our national disease,” the philosopher William James wrote in a letter to H. G. Wells, from which it may be supposed that artistic failure (which his brother Henry distilled in romances of letdown and disappointment) was a kind of therapy and, if nothing else, an escape from the vulgarity of social advancement.

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Enter one of the fonder figures of the Modernist legend: the ignored, misunderstood bohemian artist who broods in cold chambres de bonne. We should be wrong to assume that a bohemian wishes away his lack of success; he must be doing something right since the public misunderstands him. A bohemian is inveterately contrarian: he is an aristocratic dandy when society goes mad for commerce (Gautier, Nerval); he is a socialist when republicanism prevails (Champfleury, Courbet, Nadar); and he takes vows of poverty when the proletariat acquires bourgeois amenities (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lautréamont). Finally, in a society mad for success and opportunity, he glories in failure. The latter has a Promethean ring, a quixotic whiff of quest and sacrifice that appealed to the avantgarde, the Surrealists, all the way to the American bohemians of the Beat Generation. “I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn’t matter—that would be my life,” said Jasper Johns.8 In the existentialist lingo of 1950s’ Paris, the rough idea was, to quote JeanPaul Sartre, that “there is success in failure because the ‘I’ refuses, it remains open, it has not been ‘caught,’ it does not allow itself to become frozen.”9 Failure is antiestablishment; it is the last recourse of the free; it “remains open.” Yet, just there, in this openness, the failure proves his secret alliance with the ideology he, in his transcendence of abjection, appears to oppose. To keep things open indeed is a desideratum of the progress-minded middle class. In the artistic failure, the business class sees a portrait of its penchant for risk and venture, its dislike of foreclosed avenues, its opportunism, restlessness, and basically its optimism. As a point of fact, the nineteenth century didn’t elapse without La Bohème becoming a middle-class fairy tale on the stage of the Royal Opera House, and a sentimental poem, unimaginatively titled “Ma Bohème,” by Rimbaud the sixteen-year old boy from the provinces who by the age of twenty was gone into business. Such sentimentalism was not cultural appropriation but homecoming. In the figure of the unknown artist, the middle class thrilled at a sentimental fiction of its own obscure first steps on the social ladder. As Zola brought out in The Masterpiece (1886), it was often sheer bustling ambition—social climbing by means of brush and paint—which lay under the shaggy glamour of bohemianism. Finally, the ambitious failure romanticized the essentially skeptical outlook of the middle class. In traditional society, a person succeeds by sticking to their social role. A bourgeois entrepreneur, by contrast, succeeds by pulling ahead, that is, by doing something different, by questioning the field, by, Hamlet-like, outsmarting the script. The bourgeoisie is by occupational necessity skeptical: timorous and opinionated in the eyes of the seventeenth century’s nobility of the sword, faithless and all-too worldly according to its nobility of the cloth. In the nineteenth century, however, the opprobrium on skepticism pretty much fades away. Out of the new social valuation of skepticism comes a new figure, the artistic experimentalist who,

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in his trials of maladjustment and failure and rejection, glamorizes doubt and, yes, ambition. This is where we find the mad genius, the Icarus of the paintbrush or the lyre or the pen, the Frenhofer who soars and crashes. He is Roland to the Charlemagne of bourgeois society, the Romantic cousin of a family that comprises the scientist, the social reformer, the inventor, the entrepreneur who takes nothing for granted. *

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Difficulty, trying hard, failing hard: as we have seen in Part One of this volume, the constant sense of underperforming is internal to the modern experience of art; it is also, as I trust I have shown in Part One, conducive to the making of great art. There is the story of a master who graded pianists in the following way: one got a perfect score; the others got F, zero, the lowest failing grade possible. When asked to explain himself, he said: “Either you can play, or you can’t.”10 In short, in art there are no half-measures. I have disputed this purist, all-or-nothing criterion of artistic success. No Hamlet, Quixote, or Sistine Chapel ceiling would have seen the light of day under its application. The work of art with a perfect score can still be the one that trembles and groans with the awareness of coming up short. This awareness galvanizes modern art. Just the same, however, (and as I want to explore now) it is open to abuse, abuse which consists of wearing failure as the badge of greatness itself. In appearance, we have outgrown the aristocratic age of the artist-genius, the one who finds, electrified by the lightning rod of spirit, grace incarnate—“divine Michelangelo,” Leonardo of the “supernatural pencil,” or Raphael angelically “received from the immortal God.” But are we not in danger of deifying the opposite type, that is, the artist who, with much ado, does not find? Unlike in sixteenth-century Tuscany, artists in our industrious age do not want to be born this way. Art is a lifelong struggle, an existential gauntlet of reversals and impassable difficulties. “How difficult painting is!” exclaimed Gauguin for there is little glory in it being easy.11 The difficulty itself is proof of greatness: “The painting I want to do is certainly far from being done; the desire is greater than my power, my weakness is enormous.”12 An enormous weakness, unlike a paltry one, reckons with the labor sunk into the endeavor. The modern artist would have been wrong to downplay it. Incapacity was becoming a part of the artistic armory, as needful as good draftsmanship and judgment had once been. It certainly did Frenhofer no disservice—not if we understand his story to say that un-painting his masterpiece was the genius of it all. The next twist consisted of turning the inability to engender art into aesthetic gold—nay, the very gist of art. Along these lines did Van Gogh’s say that as far as I am concerned, I am determined, even when I shall be much more master of my brush than I am now—to go on telling people methodically

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that I cannot paint . . . even when I have achieved a solid manner of my own, more complete and concise than the present one!13 He underlined his words to stress the extraordinary point: if and when Van Gogh becomes a master, the world must still know that he cannot paint. For if he could, what would be the glory of art? You make a painting to show, not that you can, but that you can’t—lest it be known that, the deed being feasible, it was by the same token unworthy of the effort. As a defeat foretold underwrites artistic value, it occurs to the struggling artist to struggle on and on and stretch the prolonged failure over the whole of artistic expression. A modern wants to be known for what she will do, what she can do, what it remains possible to do, and all the while shuns accomplishment because accomplishment is inimical to futurity, and futurity is a Romantic god. Thus, Emily Dickinson, It might be easier To fail—with Land in Sight— Than gain—My Blue Peninsula— To perish of Delight—.14 Over apotheosis, the poet prefers ascetic postponement. This begets a new aesthetic, an art of stammers, a reverse Romanticism of full-throated eloquence, that is, the Romanticism of stammering, chocked-up expression— prefigured in Dickinson’s verse, which sings of abstention in an absented voice that is all dashes and broken lines, phantoms of omitted words of a poem that will never be. It set the stage for the songs of withheld revelation and artistic washout of Modernist poetry. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me”: thus T. S. Eliot sings of the song that never came. This absence harks back to the old proscription on graven images; but it is mostly the Romantic charge toward freedom running amok and turning on its own chariot. A poem, a work of art: it is deemed too confining for the infinite perfectibility of the human mind that is “Art.” A finished poem, an object of polish and perfection, would confine the artist’s albatross soul. No free spirit should agree to fold into a form. Hence the vessel must break. *

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A hybrid of the legend of freedom and that of the artist, sublime failure (i.e., I fail ergo I am onto something great) bore beautiful results so long as artists submitted to a prevailing ethos of craft. However much Dickinson staved off the accomplished poem or Van Gogh painted his not-being able to paint, they lived in a society that knew and appreciated well-made artifacts. And works of art, beautifully elaborated and emphatically worked over, are what

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in the end a Van Gogh or a Mallarmé placed before the public. However titanic the struggle, the objet bien fait was more important still. Then something happened at the turn of the twentieth century to sink this entente cordiale between artist and public. The avant-garde set freedom ahead of all other considerations. Not only could a painter abandon proficiency; he could also renege on accomplishment and be a bad painter if he so chose. Indeed, it was possible to not paint or sculpt and still call oneself a visual artist. It was possible for an entire painting or poem to be made of expressive breakdown and reluctance. It was possible to advertise oneself as a nonartist who jettisons the dead-weight of art-making and comes out the more artistic for it. Enter works of art that proudly failed and flaunted aesthetic worthlessness, an anti-art that spoke of no striving and modesty but instead bragged of deliberate underachievement. This emancipation of failure, whose ripe fruit is the avant-garde, felt like a victory of art-for-all egalitarianism. But this is arguable. In reality, the liberation of failure returned art to a pre-bourgeois mindset of impunity last seen in the decadent ancient régime. To do nothing, or very little, or in a gloriously useless way and be admired for it—wasn’t that, after all, the prerogative of dukes and peers of the realm? “Hereditary sloth instructs me,” Shakespeare has a prince say.15 This dandyish sloth is wellcurated in the person of Marcel Duchamp, primus inter pares of vanguard underachievers. Sixty years Frenhofer’s junior, Duchamp realized in 1913 that he was getting nowhere with painting and that he would never be more than a second-rate Braque and a third-rate Matisse. “Painting is washed up,” he said then, though in later years more correctly admitted that he, not painting, had washed up.16 Had it been 1700 this would have been the end of it, but the first decade of the twentieth century had so imbibed the legend that art is subordinate to self-expression (rather than a way of educating and mastering expression), that it was possible for a Duchamp to push this subordination past every downward benchmark of achievement—starting with the first series of “readymades” (i.e., not made by him) in 1915: a bicycle wheel, a shovel, a bottle rack, an industrial-grade urinal. It was pointless to object that these objects were subpar; their whole point was to be spectacularly so. They showcased Duchamp’s resolve to brazen out every standard formerly known to confer artistic value and still call it art. But the flamboyant underachievement was deceptive. Though the readymades seemed a triumph of artistic failure, in truth they finalized the Frenhoferish elevation of the artist above everything else—composition, craftsmanship, expression, intelligence, taste, perception, sensibility, indeed the work of art itself. Though an object could fail every aesthetic criterion, the artist remained an artist nonetheless, if it pleased him to keep the crown. The real gambit, then, was not whether a readymade was good art or bad art nor whether it was art or not (see Chapter 12; the point was that the artist is an artist on the mystical authority of self-appointment. The readymade is the

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artist asserting his supreme right to do away with a vehicle; it is the triumph of Romanticism—the cult of art swallowing up art till only individual sovereignty is left. In the readymade, art died so that the artist may live forever. Thus seen, the legend of artistic failure is really a facet of the legend of the unconditional artist—there being nothing, in the end, which could demote Duchamp from the pantheon. *

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As for the success of Duchamp’s mock-sabotage (the painter Robert Motherwell called him “the great saboteur,” but this plays too much into the deception), it is no wonder at all. It was a boon to every neophyte and gallerist-impresario willing to bankroll the meteoric rise. Once making art could be as little or as much as daubing a pair of mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, few were those who, given the proper connections, could not enter the market. Art is to this day the most unregulated trade of all where the supplier is in command and the willing at his mercy. Good art, bad art—this become an obsolete question, or one supremely difficult to adjudicate and explain, and this is how, uniquely in the annals of commerce, good trade is made of an untestable product. A grain dealer never made a farthing selling wheat about which it was impossible to know whether it was fit for purpose; art dealers have been running a business model out of this latitude since 1910. Affluence is partly responsible. In mid-eighteenth century, Voltaire commented on the risk of Alexandrianism in times of surfeit: “Decadence came about from doing work too easily and being too lazy to do it well, from a surfeit of fine art and a love of the bizarre.”17 Oversupply of fine art is driven by disposable wealth, but glut tends to breed fads (“love of the bizarre”), which encourages a fast turnaround of products, hence, all-too invariably a decline in quality and craftsmanship.18 From this perspective, the “de-definition of art” (as some art historians call it) may just be a way of window-dressing an overheated, thoroughly deregulated market. Before New York art dealers of the 1950s found it good for commerce, the de-definition of art had been a movement of disaffection vis-à-vis social authority.19 This is especially clear in the first European avant-garde that made no mystery of spewing disgust at the civilization responsible for the First World War. That orgy of death gave no cause to cheer for the social virtues and if reason and taste and decorum had done nothing to prevent the butchery, then perhaps it was time to give chaos and provocation a chance. For the well-made art piece, the conscientious saboteur substituted the nonmade one, and for the thoughtful statement, he advanced the sophomoric joke, like a urinal titled “Fountain.” By these means, said the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, art “is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere.” Easier said, of course, than done. First of all because the program of deliberate

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stupidity undercut itself. Where the idiotic is universal, the idiotic does not stand out, and could not establish itself even if it wanted to, because to spread idiocy requires wherewithal and know-how and an intelligent handling of idiocy. In sum, the sabotage of high art necessitates a serious aesthetic to back it up, and this, in fact, is what the avant-garde quickly turned into: a theoretic disquisition on the nature and history, the uses and purposes of art; a reflection on the challenges of making art in an age of radical doubt. The vanguard had barely done the fool’s cap that like a don it found itself handing out very philosophic manifestos and academic theories and art-critical axioms—in short, doing all those constructive things done by academies and fine art authorities since the days of Le Brun. Of course, the sabotage, or “de-establishment,” of art also harbored a genuinely Romantic desire, the longing to transcend it all—history, society, even art itself whose roots are in the hated material world. Artistic deestablishment was about stripping art of all its tools and trappings (eloquence, articulacy, form, meaning-making). Here we find artists like Samuel Beckett who dreamed, he said, “of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud of the farce of giving and receiving.”20 The stuttering utterance, the suppressed insight, the revelation postponed—through these and other means Beckett aimed at depleting literature down to the bare moan—creating, in this spirit, a theater both catatonic and gibbering, novels of formless extent and nugatory purpose, streams of consciousness that rue their own flow—in sum, an art that expresses “that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”21 It remains that the disappearing act stumbled on a basic contradiction. To be consistent, total expressive breakdown would have to lack the power to express that the writer has not the power to express. A true failure has to omit to signal its failure of expression. That, of course, is something which art cannot do. The wish to escape the art requires the artist to forgo the means by which he would signal his escape, and, as we find out, it is a price which artists are not willing to pay. As a point of fact, there is no text quite as thickly verbose and dilatory and textual as the one which, like Beckett’s, wishes itself into non-existence. “To be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail,” Beckett further said.22 The point depends on whether “fail” here is instrumental or essential. In the instrumental sense, the statement is a truism as old as the Renaissance, which says that an artist must take chances to achieve a breakthrough. Failure here is a means—which is all it ever can be. For the essential sense of “to fail” leads to nonsense. Should artistic failure be an end and should a work of art attain it, it would therefore be a success (and thereby fail at being a failure). It follows that the artist should aim at a mediocre failure, which alone would count as a true, and (in Beckett’s ledger) worthwhile, failure. This, however, leads to the absurdity that a mediocre

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failure is a worthwhile failure while true failures are not very good. “Fail again, fail better,” Beckett told aspiring artists. Notice he didn’t say “fail worse.” This is as good as an admission that artistic failure is preciosity and coyness. Perhaps it is nostalgia for a time (pre-avant-garde) when artistic failures were possible. To fail, one must first climb a ladder of certifiable achievement, which is just what the aesthetic of no-rules knocked down. The poet Gertrude Stein offers another example of self-contradiction presented as sabotage. On matters of aesthetic letdown, Stein affirmed that “a real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”23 Ringing words, to be sure, but nonsensical. A failure that is an end in itself is by the same token no failure at all. Of it we can ask whether it fails as intended. If it does, it is therefore successful; if it doesn’t, then it fails to fail and therefore isn’t the end-in-itself that was dearly wished. A fit-for-purpose failure is, for example, Stein’s own poem “Sacred Emily” (1913), which contains the well-known gem of deflationary aesthetics, “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Poetry clipping its own wings: this will be the idea behind this verse and its companions: Next to barber. Next to barber bury. Next to barber bury china. Next to barber bury china glass. Next to barber china and glass. Next to barber and china. Next to barber and hurry. Next to hurry. Next to hurry and glass and china. Next to hurry and glass and hurry. Next to hurry and hurry. Next to hurry and hurry. The matter-of-fact staccato, the hard-chinned delivery, the stairwell stumble into nonsense—this is Cubism meeting the readymade: a thing is what it is, and that’s all art should work itself up to say. But this, in fact, is not all. Impoverishment assumes the presence of riches and “a rose is a rose is a rose” subtracts only if there is abundance in the first place, that is, a floridly well-maintained poetic tradition. Without “Mignonne, allons voir si la rose” (Ronsard) or “that thereby beauty’s rose might never die” (Shakespeare) or “love is like the wild rose-briar” (Emily Brontë), to think only of those, “a rose is a rose is a rose” falls flat. In truth it is poesy battening on the library. This dependency is perfectly legitimate, but it contradicts artistic Modernism’s claims of tabula rasa. The problem with “a rose is a rose is a rose” is that it is mostly reactive, like a pair of moustache drawn on a portrait, and thereby stakes everything on tradition. It violates Stein’s own idea that “a real failure does not need an excuse.” Stein is right about the spirit of nihilism: failure-for-its-own-sake speaks like the lord of misrule Iago who after tearing the world to pieces turns to the audience and says, “Demand me nothing. From this time forth I never will speak a word.” “A rose is a rose is a rose” works quite otherwise. Literary criticism (i.e., the giving of excuses) supports its poetic effect: its rose blooms only in the hothouse of artsy justification.

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Modernism really was nothing like the wild child of art it claimed to be— not if we consider that it was as theory-laced and manifesto-ridden an art form as ever there was: an art which desperately needed talking about, so much so that the aesthetic statement of purpose imbricated itself in the work of art upon conception—the deed and its apologia wrapped into one. Though it looks factual and terse, in truth a readymade is a whole disquisition about the past and future and wherefore of art. Like “a rose is a rose is a rose,” it is not art but about art. The vanguard really only rearranged the external dress of artworks; and what it took away from form it gave back in plenty to the idea of art, which rose to Platonic heaven and Hegelian paradise: so secure was art in its essence that it needed no material manifestations. The great sabotage was really apotheosis—art becoming immune to tangible evidence, art only needing to say it is art, and discourse on art to be art. This was not the undoing of art at all but its immunization against all undoing. Here Duchamp’s words come back to mind: “Art may be bad, good, or indifferent, but whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art.” Like Yahweh, art may be good and it may be bad, but it is always God. And it is an art grown very sure of its godhood that tolerates even its grand priests to smirk; it is an art unimpeachably certain of its essence which, through the mouth of this New Yorker critic can say of a Damien Hirst exhibit, “I found myself grinning a lot, and not worrying whether the stuff was really any good.”24 Why worry indeed when bad art is as good an art as ever there was?

7 The Legend of the New

The heroism of nonachievement taps a kindred legend of modern art, which is destruction. Its inception finds us back in Frenhofer’s studio, the masterpiece of whom contains the gradual undoing of an excellent, though not visionary, portrait. This self-destructing masterpiece held late Romantics and Modernists spellbound with the idea that art is as much composition as de-composition. If novelty is the driving force of modern society and if destruction is internal to novelty, then modern art must destroy, and the artist is the wrecking ball. Nor did the destruction of precedents have to occur shamefully in the back shop; it could have pride of place, and, like a road accident, lure the gaze, fascinated, gloating, or affrighted as the case may be. Thus, Frenhofer whose modern masterpiece consists of undoing the classical masterpiece contained within. Thus, the Symbolist poet Mallarmé who said that “destruction was my Beatrice” and deconstructed a poetic verse the same way his Impressionist friends dismantled the old pictorial scheme in the “sketches,” “unfinished scribbles,” “chaos of brutal brushstrokes,” and “anarchy” that outraged the critics at the Impressionist exhibit of 1876.1 The alarm was hyperbolic but did not entirely misjudge the Frenhoferish pictures of Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Morisot, still more of Gauguin, and the post-Impressionists and Primitivists. Their spirit was to break new ground by dismantling the rules of representation, indeed of perception itself. Of course, to the Impressionists, as for Mallarmé and the generation of artists until roughly 1890, destruction was merely a technique, a way of clearing or turning over the page. This was about to change in the next two decades of the twentieth century when a new vitalist philosophy glorifying force and the will won a generation to the charms of destruction, artistic, and political. “No masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness. Poetry should be a violent assault. . . . We will destroy museums,” shouted the futurist manifesto of 1908. If power and freedom and will are always hale, affirmative, and beautiful, then destruction is a thing of beauty. Art is on the side of Dionysus,

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Nietzsche’s god of mayhem and chaos. “More beautiful than a beautiful thing is the ruin of a beautiful thing,” said Auguste Rodin.2 “As Dada marches, it continually destroys,” continued Tristan Tzara.3 “The fairest monument that can be erected / The most astonishing of statues . . . / Are not worth a splendid and chaotic heap,” sang the Surrealist poet Aragon.4 Not to be left behind, the avant-gardist Alfred Jarry added, “We won’t have destroyed anything until we also destroy the ruins.”5 This blind confidence in the revitalizing force of chaos, the Modernist pursued also inward, into the form and subject matter of artistic expression. In this sense did Picasso declare (it was around the time he was illustrating the Vollard edition of Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu) that “a picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then I destroy it.”6 You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, agreed fascists and Bolsheviks; well, modern art wanted to be an omelet of emphatically broken eggs—with shells and shards mixed in: a field of ruins, an explosion in midburst, a beautiful waste, a Surrealist paradox, a senseless glory. Together with the unfinished, the aesthetic of destruction is the more enduring legacy of the avant-garde.7 Its spirit hovers over every pile of dirt and debris of the contemporary art gallery—the bicycle wheel on a stool, the unmade bed, the odds and ends heaped together to signify the rejection of determinate process, of craft and discipline and elaboration which binds the will and builds a prison and everywhere puts the spirit in chains. This spirit was, of course, the Rousseauist apologia of native freedom newly invigorated by Friedrich Nietzsche’s wrecking-ball philosophy. In temperament, Nietzsche was a Romantic and a nostalgic. At a time of improving social conditions, rising literacy, and popular democratic activism, he saw only spiritual blight and moral decadence and lassitude. Everywhere he beheld “chaos, a nihilistic sigh, ignorance as to where and whence, an instinct of fatigue.”8 The remedy, as he saw it, was a great upheaval, renewal by liquidation, a reaffirmation of the old heroic mettle, of bravado, reckless action, egotistical affirmation, even cruelty. This nostalgia for the sword informed his views on art, which loom large over the generation of 1910. Art, he explains, is creation—in which extent it is constructive; but to the extent that it is genuinely creative, art is also about overthrowing precedents.9 To the making side of art, Nietzsche gave the name of the god Apollo. But another god tugs at the human heart, a powerful and rapturous instinct that yearns to yield to chaos, and to this end seeks to tear down the façade of Apollonian form. This other force, Nietzsche calls Dionysius. It is the amor fati that counterbalances Apollo’s horror vacui. Though Nietzsche tried to balance the making and unmaking halves of art, there is no mistaking his attraction to the Dionysian. Indeed he repeatedly commits the slip of calling it “art.” Thus, “art is the sanguine hope that the spell of individuation [which makes images and forms] may be broken, as an augury of eventual reintegration.”10 Here, Nietzsche reveals

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his Romantic-progressivist bias: art is impatient, overflowing, tempestuous, rapturous; it is the nemesis of tradition; indeed, deep down, it is the wish that there be no tradition at all.11 To be sure, the molten Dionysian rapture needs a vessel, a form, in which to flow and mold itself. To this extent, Dionysius relies on Apollo. Yet, this reliance alone does not produce art; art happens if the Apollonian temple is blown up: “Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo, finally, the language of Dionysus; thereby the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is reached . . .. The world of appearance is pushed to its limits, where it denies itself and seeks to escape back into the world of primordial reality.”12 In other words, art-making must turn to art unmaking if anything of sensorial and existential interest is to happen. It is a terrifically stirring vision, this legend of Dionysus the destroyer freeing art and civilization from the plebeian labor of continuity. As legends are, however, it is also illusory for the simple reason that unmaking art wagers on the resilience of art-making. Breakage occurs only if there is something to break, and therefore an absolutely liberated expression is therefore formless and naught. In truth, the Dionysian relies on a constant supply of beautifully formed things to mangle and blow up. The Romantic destroyer needs the craftsman within to keep doing his job. Barring the persistence of the well-made painting or poem, the destructive assault flounders. This logical necessity makes the Lord of Misrule a vassal of the God of Order, and which needless to say dampens the emancipatory fire of Modernism. On the other hand, it explains why the Dionysian Modernist should have been so obsessed with tradition, the museum, the old masters, old-time representation, and the like: take away the history of art, and the unmaking of art unmakes nothing. There is a further incongruity about the legend of destruction. Just what unmaking means in practice? Does the tearing down of Apollonian form makes forms of its own, yes or no? If it doesn’t, which is truest way of escaping the servitude of form, there is nothing to clap our ears or eyes or comprehension onto and therefore nothing to talk about. If it does, it absolutely gainsays its own intention. Thus, Dionysian Picasso may well have made a painting and then destroyed it, but in the end the process boils down to a technique of composition. Anything done to a work of art, whether correction or subtraction, accrues to it. After we demolish a house, there is no more house, whereas the artist who “destroys” his artifact produces an artifact that is doubly constructed: it bears the archaeological marks of what has been made, recycled, and regurgitated. If anything, supposedly destructive Modernism is eminently constructivist, as the evolution of styles shows from Cézanne onward: it produced forms of art positively obsessed with their architectonics, the dialectical give-andtake of composition, and the technicalities of representation. Modernism is an art of not barbarians but goldsmiths and scholiasts. Not by surprise,

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the Dionysian revel filed soon enough into the garrisons of Cubism, Constructivism, Neo-Rationalism, the International Style—all fancies of the engineer and the master-builder. To be sure, the tribal drums did pound hard in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), enough to make the public think that cacophony had engulfed Western music, but the ear to which it was pitched was the musical connoisseur all the same, the technician of culture who made out the clockwork of musical borrowings and citations knowingly running through it. As for the Modernist renewal and purification of poetry, it followed the path of the Symbolists and the Imagists to come, the T. S. Eliots and Ezra Pounds and Wallace Stevenses of the next generation, produced minutely composed, adamantine jewels of verse—a poetry of strenuous Apollonian concoction. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” reflects Eliot in coda to The Waste Land (1922). Fragments they certainly seemed to be, but they made up a remarkably robust masonry, a piece of exquisite scholarly craft that is the antipodes of ruin. Dionysus, it seems, can’t help doing Apollo’s work. *

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Enveloping the legend of destruction is the passion for novelty. This passion is no invention of the modern; indeed, it crops up whenever and wherever, whether in the Rome of the first century or the Italian city-states of the fourteenth, urban folks have enough money to spend on superfluities and compete for attention by donning and discarding fashions. Thus, Italian artists of the late 1300s sang the virtues of a “sweet new style” against the crabby old ways, and the spirit of competition, hence experimentation, hence change, and thereafter the taste for it (i.e., fads and trends) inflamed Florence and Venice and Paris and London. Not that newness was adopted without reservation. The old medieval suspicion of novelty lingered in the annals and the laws, and for a long time the very word “novelty” kept a whiff of deviance and sedition. With such connotation was it used by the contemporaries of Shakespeare. “It is the duty of private men to obey, and not to make innovations after their own will,” said the English translation of Calvin’s Institute.13 Novelty was facile, demagogic, unlettered: a pleasure to the ear and the eye, to be sure, but ultimately, and especially in high art, a symptom of ignorance and vulgar opportunism. If there is a time when we can say Europe definitely put away its medieval scorn of the new and gave novelty a reasoned discourse, we would have to point to the end of the classical age, or the years 1690–1720 when the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns which raged with varying intensity in England and France ended in favor of the Moderns, and neophilia, together with the bourgeois entrepreneurial spirit and the mindset of innovation, progress, curiosity, surprise, and discovery, declared itself openly and without shame. “The age is running mad after innovation,” Samuel Johnson observed approvingly

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of the eighteenth century.14 As science, technology, business, and politics flattered themselves with being progressive and the spirit of continuity had to reckon itself “conservative,” art became a bastion of forward-looking experimentation. The new market of book publishing urged competition upon writers who responded as competitors always do, by diversifying their products and changing the formula. A similar process transformed painting and sculpture whose market, transferred from aristocratic patronage to the middle-class multitude, adopted the unashamed progressiveness of bourgeois economics. It was then the word “originality” changed meaning from the medieval “that which has existed from the first” to the modern “that which is singular, fresh, novel” and, needless to say, desirable. Neoteric art, then, is of a piece with the liberal tendencies of free-market economics. This is why we must look skeptically on the constant idea of modernity that equates novelty with anti-bourgeois pugnacity and bohemian independence. This is a Romantic legend of tenacious longevity—this idea that the artist is a bohemian enemy of a supposedly staid and regressive bourgeois state of affairs. Can we not equally say that the novelty-wielding artist is an economic entrant jockeying to wedge into the market? And is there any real spirit of independence in having to follow novelty? “Il faut être de son temps,” said Baudelaire, which can mean either “one must embrace the present” or “we’ve got no choice but to follow the times”—in which case the bohemian is shackled to novelty, not a free agent of it. Where one is sentenced to innovate, innovation is tyranny. This tyranny—the relentless hand of the market—is nevertheless what Modernism enshrined in its name (from modo, “just now”), perhaps to anesthetize itself against the painful realization that, having thrown its lot with novelty, it was now slave to it. Still, between the taskmaster of novelty and the old ball and chain of history, the Modernist was quick to make up his mind. Better to serve the new master. “We must be absolutely modern,” said Rimbaud in 1873; “make it new,” echoed Ezra Pound some forty years later. A whole philosophy was on hand to assist this new servitude by first of all, concealing its servility, and singing its praises. To be of the present, it was nothing but to be fully human, strong, happy, and free. “Only the man who has outgrown the stage of consciousness belonging to the past . . . can achieve a full consciousness of the present,” said psychologist Carl Jung who with this fiat makes fealty to the past sickly, and immersion in the present hale and good.15. Feebly could it be argued that a present that grows clear of the past has but a poor knowledge of what it is. Loyalty to tradition, or even omission to repudiate it, was a bad career choice for artist who in any case was made to feel that by being modern he was in tune with himself and the gist of art. Thus, the Frenhofer we moderns warm to is not the one Balzac probably admired, the painter of consummate craft; the Frenhofer that fascinates us is the one who makes himself a primitive, a child, an untutored beginner for the sake of novelty.

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Time to unpack this narcissistic passion of the modern for itself, for the now. It doesn’t take much logical finesse to see that it is fraught with by contradiction. If, as Jung claims, we are only fully of the present by outgrowing the past, then the present is negation, and a negation, whatever else it is, is not a novelty. It is an old thing crossed out, a correction that bears the trace of what has been. So long as it looks to the past to know what it is not, neophilia looks backward. Pace Rimbaud, one cannot be absolutely modern. A thoroughly modern movement, one that is made of memoryless self-awareness, would be either unintelligible or voiceless. “Let’s ask the poet for the new—ideas and forms” (Rimbaud again). Very well, but it takes cultivating a vivid sense of the old to appreciate the new. Novelty is therefore reactive, and indeed works best when it is reactive. As a matter of fact, the word “modern” was first used in the seventeenth century to mean, not “new,” “fresh,” and “up-to-date” but belated, historically downstream, weighted by antiquated knowledge. This is the sense in which the French writer Fontenelle meant the word in his Digression on the Ancients and Moderns (1688). The quintessentially modern Baudelaire understood this well and set his poems of modern life in Renaissance Petrarchan sonnets. Like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound after him, he sensed that the modern involves the antiquarian. To go off with a bang, it has to sit tight in the pressure cooker of tradition. Thus, the so-called tension between innovation and tradition is really partnership. “We want to demolish the museums and libraries,” clamored Marinetti:16 had this come to pass, the Modernist would have had no base from which to lobe his missiles. Mondrian’s idea that Modernism is “a liberation from the oppression of the past” misunderstands how much oppression it needs in order to function.17 All the badges of honor of Modernism (rare, untried, peculiar, autonomous, heretic, insubordinate) depend on their binary opposites (routine, tested, ordinary, observant). To understand modern art and its legend of novelty, we therefore need to recognize what it was deep down: an offshoot of the growing consolidation of organisms of historical maintenance. Modern art is inexplicable without the creation of the great public art museums of Europe from 1830 onward. They imposed on the artist a new way of relating to art. No longer did tradition trickle down piecemeal, one chance encounter at a time, or in the person of a teacher, a workshop master, or a local set of practices. Instead art loomed as one big towering block in permanent apotheosis, unassailable behind the palace guard of museums— citadels of consecrated genius and cultural riches that are the despair of supplicants. The world of Frenhofer is indeed that of historical surfeit, as witness Balzac’s description: The visitor . . . came to a fourth gallery, where his tired eyes were greeted by in turn, a number of paintings by Poussin, a sublime statue by Michelangelo, several enchanting landscapes by Claude Lorrain,

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a Gerard Dow canvas which resembled a page of Sterne, Rembrandts . . .; then ancient bas-reliefs, goblets in agate, wonderful pieces of onyx! In short, works that would discourage anyone from working, so many masterpieces brought together as to wear down enthusiasm and make one hate the arts.18 The encyclopedic past smothers the fledgling present. Now the aspiring artist has to prove himself, not to a single incidental mentor but to the whole of tradition—an entire vista of summits, each impossible to scale in a single lifetime. No wonder if, before this oppressive magnificence, the newcomer should want to “hate the arts” and wish the whole thing away, pretend the past is naught, turn frantically to the future, and call itself a vanguard. Baudelaire it was who, though a herald of modernity, understood just how much scholarly baggage the modern artist really drags around. “Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility,” he said of himself and modern brethren.19 Perhaps in the same vein he complimented Manet on his ripe historical self-consciousness: “You are but the first in the decrepitude of your art,” he said, guessing at the secret senescence behind the provocative brushwork.20 Neither youth nor bold novelty did Baudelaire find in Manet but rather a kind of backwardlooking novelty, a melancholy fixation on the grand tradition, a specimen of what is in fact the art-historical quality of modernity. The weight of tradition is responsible for the oft-noted self-consciousness of modern art. Of course, a Modernist masterpiece like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is as brash, youthful, and forward-looking as any painting of its time. Just the same, its slash-and-thrust does not make 1907 the year zero of Western art. It feeds on the polish and cordiality of the “peinture bien faite,” and its sharp elbows need the plush contours of Rubens’s Three Graces for contrast. As independent-minded as it seems, the Demoiselles d’Avignon is a museum piece—a slice of tradition precisely for being so concertedly anti-traditional. “A young artist,” said Picasso, “must forget painting when he paints. That’s the only way he will do original work.”21 It is a piece of advice he himself did not, and could not, follow. Indeed, the years following his Cubist decade saw Picasso downshifting from explosive assault to morose meditation (his so-called neo-classical period of 1920–30) when, pastiching the classics, he painted sad jesters, minstrels, and Pierrots that mourn the new dawn that never came—portraits of the vanguardist who understands how much old-age rumination goes into modern art. Here is Picasso as an artist and harlequin who sees he can do many things except “forget painting” and start anew. This mournful admission of the nonstarter of being new, in fact, suffuses modernity. *

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By its very name, a vanguard entails combat—a battle, in this instance, against the past, reactionary attitudes, the museum. Of course, the fight itself admits the strength and resilience of that which is supposedly being eliminated. A tradition that is genuinely superannuated withdraws of its own. Tired customs, like elephants, quietly go off to die. They need no prodding attack or vandalizing expulsion. To want the museum in ruins, it is to admit that the newcomer is in fact quite unsure of his newness, doubts that it is new at all, and wants all damning evidence destroyed. This furious assault climaxes in futurism, the art of “ruinous and incendiary violence” heralded by Marinetti: “We today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries. . . . We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.”22 That futurism burst out of the most antiquarian of the European cocoons is no coincidence. Without Italy’s “olds walls and old palaces” (to quote the futurist painter Umberto Boccioni), a futurist is out of work. Work which, necessarily, is short-lived— the problem with destruction being that it happens once. Keep blowing up the same museum again and again, and your audience will soon wonder if your heart is really set on destroying it. The futurists prophesized a great deal but, except for Boccioni, left little by way of important works. Perhaps the futurists were too beholden to their impatience, their horror of waiting and ripening, to produce strong art. Such is the nature of Baudelairean modernity, that is, of the love of “the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent,” that it must not settle into a form.23 The futurists wanted the intoxication of speed, the frantic onward race whose mad desire to eliminate time, to keep going and never pause long enough to take stock, cannot reverse the fact that speed is relative to a fixed point. Wanting to describe transience from within transience and by destructive transience, the futurists ended up spinning their wheels. They could announce the art they dreamed of; they could not take the time to make it. A conceptual art avant la lettre, futurism consisted in great part of manifestos of the oft-imitated form “we envision/want/demand/struggle for an art that is” followed by a string of specifications. Enamored of the next thing, forward-looking art resolved itself into the dew of promises. *

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When youth becomes aware of itself and turns into a youth movement or a youth culture, it becomes enslaved to the fear of old age. No fear makes a person old quite so instantly. The truly young do not harp on their youth. “I want to be as though newborn, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing,” said the painter Paul Klee: the very desire, and its expression, dissolves whatever youth and primitive vigor it hopes to find. At this point newism turns into a panic of latecoming, and the carnival of youth, the rite of Spring

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grows obsessed with vitality—a sure sign of valetudinarian hypochondria. The vanguardists rejected their world simply for having endured. “A world grown old and cold and weary,” said the English poet Rupert Brooke about the civilization that was about to blow itself up on the Western Front. “An old bitch, gone in the teeth,” agreed Ezra Pound. These sayings were legion at the turn of the century. Of course, it would have been more truthful to say that, not the old bitch but, the youth generation of 1910 felt tired—tired by the consciousness of following in the footsteps of a period of Western history that had been anything but stale and senescent, but a genuine youth culture in action—abundant, restless, revolutionary, experimental, and chaotically inventive. Such was the period between 1800 and 1900, and it is hardly a mildewed culture which, to speak only of art (science and technology presents an even more revolutionary landscape), rolled out Romantic art, the social novels of Dickens, Balzac, Eliot, and Tolstoy, the visionary storms of Turner, Beethoven, and Wagner, or the miracle streak which from Courbet to Cézanne brought forth a painting genius with every decade. These are hardly the doings of a conventional, ossified, straitened century. That the newcomers of 1900 felt exhausted is undeniable; but this doesn’t commit us to accept their bluff, which was to fob off their exhaustion onto the so-called Victorian age they depicted as a catatonic decline to which they offered a bubbling Renaissance. Actually, their determination to belittle, lampoon, or deface the past (e.g., hanging facial hair on the Mona Lisa) throws doubt on the confidence of their youth. To resolve that the only way to deal with the past is destruction is a sign of not vigor but raging impotence. Not coincidentally the very traits which art historian Kenneth Clark identified as the hallmarks of senescent artists (“transcendental pessimism,” “reckless freedom of facture,” “retreat from realism,” “impatience with established technique,” “rougher style,” “sense of isolation,” and “mistrust of reason”) are those of the avant-garde.24 For a historical precedent of Modernism’s withdrawal into dream states, fear of banality, jacked-up tensions, and taste for riddling and dismantling of technique, we should have to go back to mannerism, which was the waning style of a tired Renaissance. Not that Modernism, if it be a phase of cultural fatigue, did not produce riches; yet, how much weary anxiety in them; how much retreat it bespeaks— starting with its signature style, abstraction (the supreme sign of old-age art according to Clark). “The more fearful the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract,” said Paul Klee.25 About the link between abstraction and societal depression, we have the example of Greco-Roman civilization whose artistic expressions became more calligraphic as it dissolved and recovered sensual and worldly forms only in the twelfth century when medieval Christendom felt sure of its momentum. The confident Renaissance was naturalistic and sensuous; riven by social and religious unrest, the mannerist period recoiled into schematism. Modernist abstraction, which was forged in the fires of the First World War, is no less the child of distrust

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and fearfulness. An abstract picture tries to carve an island of order out of a chaotic world. Its sovereignty is that of an embattled mind seeking in formal isolation some relief from an overwhelming reality. *

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Earlier I mentioned that the neophilic tendency of modernity mirrors the innovation mindset of industrial societies. Science is unquestionably the success story of the modern age. Ever since the seventeenth century it has drawn the curiosity, the envy, the grudging admiration of intellectuals. In the nineteenth century a movement known as positivism beguiled the cultural class with the rhetoric of scientific innovation. For a while, nothing lent a veneer of punctilious seriousness to the adepts of Naturalism, postImpressionism, Pointillism, Surrealism, Constructivism, and so on than a smattering of scientific terms. Just the same, the effort to line up artistic innovation and scientific discovery rested on a misunderstanding. To speak of novelty only, it is obvious that science has no special love for it. Science does not seek to create new laws but to discover those that operate in nature. Its outlook is, in this respect, retrogressive: it is to establish what has always been there, the permanent laws behind the welter of events and impressions. The validity of a scientific breakthrough is not whether it is revolutionary but whether it is true, that is, whether it works and accords with existing facts. As for technology, it too isn’t free-wheeling but beholden to the criterion of betterment. Thus, an automotive engineer cannot talk society into adopting a new steering control device just because it is new; the new device has to deliver real improvements on real problems and limitations. Now, when we turn to art and literature, it is clear that no such improvement is needful. Though innovative, Joyce’s Ulysses did not remove an identifiable hindrance or deliver an improvement. It offered a different way of telling a story, as Cubism offered a different way of organizing pictorial space. Aware that their sort of novelty is not supported by betterment, artists and intellectuals had to fall back on the commercial cultivation of novelty for its own sake and equate being new with interest. This merging of the two mentalities, the artistic and the fashionable, comes to a head in the obstreperous cleverness of a great deal of contemporary art where the odd juxtaposition of existing elements in unexpected combination, that is, the rhetoric of the punch line, is often the reason for being of an installation: a cow in a vitrine, an oblong football, dung on canvas. These works have the virtue of being surprising, to be sure, even if their determination to puzzle the brain is in the end terribly predictable, and the result disposable after the first giggle. Philosophy does this newism no favor by dressing it in the language of progressivism. We are told that “the simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise . . . is sufficient to change the whole

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experience of practice, and, by the same token, its logic.”26 To which we must say, not so fast. Though the thought that things can be otherwise may lead to change them, the process isn’t automatic: knowing that I could be handwriting, rather than typing, this sentence will not make me want to take up pen and paper. To say that the thought of change entails change “by the same token” is irrational; it is the cultish belief that novelty is in itself positive. It is progressivism making a mockery of its initial impulse, which presumably is to make measurable progress, that is, an improvement. But progressivism in Modernist and contemporary art actually proscribes the question of progress. We are not to voice the sort of evaluative judgments by which art historians from Vasari to Winckelmann could in good conscience rank artists according to better and worse. The modern relativist is loath to say that painter X does things better than painter Y. This is how Duchamp ran a business model on the assumption that no person of taste would question whether his readymades improved or deteriorated sculptural art. He knew that their being “different” underwrote their claim to our attention, indeed that it was their safe conduct into the annals of art. But there seems to be some mendacity in this ploy. Duchamp (this goes also for his countless epigones) relied on a compliant, not to say, servile public silenced by the conviction of supposedly having outgrown evaluative judgments. At the same time, however, his readymades were flagrantly and catastrophically below the level of craft and care and devotion of any ordinary statue. In other words, the readymades made snobs and hypocrites of us who are made to see, but never say, that his conceptions are of the most infantile kind. Here I am, says Duchamp’s urinal, in all my spectacular mediocrity, and I dare you to denounce me for it. Duchamp took that gamble and won because he correctly diagnosed the spirit of his time: it was not provocation and anti-elitism (to which in fact, being generally a conservative, Duchamp only paid lip service); it was elite aristocratism. The political parallel of performance-without-evaluation or innovation-without-improvement is not progressive liberal democracy; performance-without-evaluation is impunity, and impunity is the trademark of regressive societies where an authoritarian ruling class flouts rules without justification. The artist is free from history, quality, judgment, and evaluation; the artist can do as little as he pleases: this is a figure of the godanointed despot who reserves the privilege of being ineffective and nugatory, and yet still rule. *

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Another sense in which artistic culture misappropriated the prestige of scientific innovation centers on the mistaken use of the words “innovation,” “innovative,” “original,” and “new.” There is much talk of, in the jargon, “paradigm shifts,” a term borrowed from the philosophy of science and

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technology, where it perhaps belongs, and transplanted into culture, where it does not. Clean technological breaks do indeed sometimes happen. Thus, the wheel-barrow does not “reimagine” the pack mule, the carbon filament light bulb is not a “critique” of candlelight, and the steam engine doesn’t “reflect” on horsepower. These innovations break sharply from prevailing ways of handling freight, lighting, and traction. Is art capable of such “paradigm shifts”? This is doubtful, first of all because art is a cultural expression, and culture is an umbrella term for the ways in which societies manage continuity. Culture is the sum of judgments a society passes on itself, and these judgments are not free of jurisprudence, historical memory, tradition, and precedent. Cultural change, when it happens, responds to an existing state of things. The Reformation was a cultural shift of sorts, to be sure, and brought great transformations, but transformations that had been aborning in Catholic Christendom, and kept in dialogue with it. By contrast, air travel does not grow out of the horse-and-carriage, nor contends with it, nor tries to assimilate it, nor maintains a conversation with it. A cultural divide is an oxymoron which forgets that in culture the new ventriloquizes the old. As a cultural product, to return to our subject, art is inescapably about the art that’s been. Proust’s idea that a work of art creates the aesthetic standards in which it will be appreciated is Modernist wishful thinking; so is Heidegger’s claim that “whenever art happens, a thrust enters, history either begins or starts again.”27 An artist who shocks or revolutionizes existing aesthetic forms does not operate outside of them. Whereas science can be genuinely revolutionary, art is merely reformist. This is why we can make out traces of future art in past art (like a foreshadowing of the Demoiselles d’Avignon in Cézanne) whereas it is impossible to foresketch quantum computing in, say, the abacus. Moderns and Modernists liked to speak of artistic “discoveries.” “It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what he has done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries,” said T. S. Eliot in 1918.28 “We are forever making new discoveries,” Malevich asserted.29 In fact, this is a rhetorical misappropriation of science’s rightly claim to discovery. A scientist can and does uncover facts or objects that exist independently of our discovering them. Newton discovered gravity because he did not invent it, and he did not invent it because gravity had been pulling apples down to the ground ever since there apples appeared on trees. Likewise atomic nuclei emitted radioactivity before Madame Curie inferred its existence. The same cannot be said of Imagist poetry and Cubist fragmentation. Art is not a virgin jungle dotted with gems and oddities waiting to be chanced upon. The artist invents what she “finds.” Thus an artist cannot help doing what she has done and seen others do already—because an invention is a mental conception, and conceptions spring from socio-psycho-historical sediment. To ask an artist to do something new assumes an impossible act of self-

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emptying; one would have to stop being the person one has been, flush out every remnant of one’s personality, and achieve total incoherence. Such incoherence, in fact, was contemplated by the Surrealists who fancied themselves paleontologists of the unconscious. But to lay bare the genuinely undiscovered stratum, they had to pretend not to know what they were aiming at. Such was the method, which, in practice, meant the (self-contradictory) pursuit of candor—through “automatic writing,” “spontaneous poetry,” or random table games. Leaving aside the fact that this studied nescience thoroughly misunderstands scientific discovery, which, if the word science means anything, hinges on careful, cumulative, and disciplined knowledge, the fact remains that what gets dredged out of the psyche is, not new, but composite and composted: the past in its cruddiest rags. Not coincidentally Surrealist spontaneity took the form of antiquarian bricolage, neurotic introjection, not to speak of, in the 1930s, dogmatic theorizing, and finally the scholasticism of psychoanalytic self-interpretation—everything, in other words, except the fresh air of discovery. *

*

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Earlier I stated that scientific breakthroughs solve actual problems whereas art does not. The claim merits elaborating. The idea that art-making involves confronting and solving problems is part of the intellectualist legacy of Romanticism. Frenhofer was one of its earliest creatures—Frenhofer and his “research,” “his meditation on color and the absolute truth of line.” Cézanne also was one to speak of his mysterious “problems”—as in “nature presents me with the greatest problems,” and after Kandinsky and Mondrian, the image of the artist as solving problems, and problems that supposedly needed solving, becomes increasingly common.30 There is “the problem of form” (Kandinsky), the “space problem and the problem of time” (Naum Gabo), and soon the problem of art itself. There is no question that an artist encounters difficulties; whether these difficulties are problems (unsolved, being complex and obstructed by many obstacles”) is an open question.31 Genuine problems have an objective existence reckoned by more than one person and certifiably solved by repeatable experiments. We sometimes don’t know where the problem lies, but we always know when it has been cracked, because now we can do things we were previously unable to do. In artistic creation, by contrast, and especially in the post-rule, post-craft modern period, it is hard to see what objective problems impede an artist. A problem here seems to be more a personal projection than a recognizable barrier. Cézanne’s problems probably have no independent existence apart from his wanting them to be there. Whether he solves or not is not subject to external verification, because we have no clear sense of what the problem is, and what would count as solving it.

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Actually, modern art’s real problem is really its dearth of problems, especially technical problems, which, after 1900, are waived out of existence. Where no technical proficiency is needed to make art (consider the readymades), achievement is marvelously stress-free and easy-does-it. Perhaps the heavy breathing about artistic problem-solving comes in to save appearances. As the no-artistic-competence-needed sign goes down, the only-the-mysteriously-competent-need-apply shibboleth comes up. Instead of humdrum technical difficulties, the Modernist was now wrestling with the angels of a mysterious aim, a thing pompously known as “research”—a term half the child of the laboratory and half that of the holy quest. The mummery of research grew widespread enough in the art world as to irritate some, like the supremely hands-on Picasso: Nothing is more false than . . . the spirit of research. When I paint, my purpose is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. . . . The idea of research has often made painting go astray. . . . It has made [artists] attempt to paint the invisible, and therefore, the unpaintable.32 Therein spoke the craft ethos of yore who wanted people to know that when they bought, say, a Picasso, they bought a “positive and conclusive” attainment—not a problem or a shot in the dark. Working solutions to unstated Frenhoferish problems lead to “the unpaintable,” which is no evidence of profundity. Not every failure is the result of reaching for the stars, nor is every sketch a masterpiece in the womb. Sometimes “research” is a cover for sterility. So Picasso seems to have thought.

8 The Legend of Creativity

So far we have seen how the legend of novelty leads to the legend of research, which ties back into the legend of virtuous sterility: I seek therefore I don’t need to find. Modernism’s “raid on the inarticulate” (T. S. Eliot) discovers that it may not even have to articulate itself. These are the legends (to visit later, for example, Chapter 10) that live downstream the legend of novelty. Upstream we still need to locate the source legend, perhaps the real “principal fault of modern art” mentioned by Picasso. It is a central tenet of our aesthetic belief system: the legend of creativity. By no means a reputable quality in every society and time in history, creativity became a virtue when Renaissance humanists parted company with a strictly religious sense of human life. Throughout the Middle Ages it had been one that complied with the natural and divine scheme of things; the humanist Renaissance wanted man to be the creature that excels at transforming all schemes and frameworks of existence. In this spirit did the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola aver in 1486 among all creatures on earth, man dreams and fashions himself into existence, makes a picture of the world, and then moves into that picture. Retelling story of Genesis, Pico had God deliver this message to our earliest ancestor: “Neither a fixed above nor a form that is yours alone have We given you, Adam, to the end that according to your longing and according to your judgment you may have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions you yourself shall desire.”1 We, in sum, were nature-born creators, homo faber optimus who like God transforms the world the moment he touches it. This new ethos placed artists at the forefront of human types: they, after all, spend their lives creating and thereby cultivating that which is most human. The new emphasis of creation also led artists to distance themselves from artisans, with whom they had been sharing the same workshops, and affirm their distinctive activity. This distinctiveness marked itself during the mannerist generation and by 1550 it was clear, at least it was to the likes of Vasari, that invenzione was the gist of what made a work of painting properly artistic. An artisan replicates, an artist creates.

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Certain material conditions (like the fact that, for all their posturings, painters and sculptors and poets remained very much at the service of princely patrons) kept this heady self-regard under wraps for the next two centuries. Then Romanticism (and the liberation of artists from the contractwielding patron) untied the package and homo faber optimus came forth, emboldened and stronger, ready to exercise the rights of homo poeticus optimus—the creature who creates the world, the creature who is poesis, invention pure and original, according to the Schlegels and Schellings and Fichtes of the German Romantic springtime. In this scheme, artists were seen as the most human sort of human beings. Or as the American Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman put it in high Romantic tones, “artists are the first men.”2 They are the first men because they create originally, hence (since creation must not be a copy) from within. Creation is the individual daring to be fully and absolutely without obligation to external reality. “An artist is he who has his center within himself,” declared Schlegel.3 This center is irresistible; it is all; it is the source of all reality. Poesis is power. It is in this unregenerate Romantic sense (spiced with a dash of political activism) that book titles and exhibition catalogs today often trumpet “the power of art.”4 These two words, power and art, roll easily enough off the modern tongue. Isn’t art the power to dream up worlds, to subjugate and subjectify matter at will? And isn’t that activity what we call power? “Nothing is so characteristic of the artist as his power of shaping his works,” said Lionel Trilling.5 This power is at the heart of the legend of creativity—it is the giant demiurge next to whom technique, use, public taste, patrons, customers, indeed artworks themselves are niggling Lilliputians. “The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all” (Picasso).6 Creation isn’t an accessory to achievement; it is the raison d’être of achievement; it is that which the pen, the brush, or the chisel exist to make visible. “There is no such thing as painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; there is only creation!” said the futurist Umberto Boccioni.7 As art-making becomes a servant to creativity, the artist’s fiat grows supreme, and the idea of mastery (which says that creation is mastered, not let loose) goes by the board. In this sense Braque praised Cézanne for “sweeping painting clear of the idea of mastery.”8 Mastery is first of all self-control, restraint, and acknowledgment of antagonistic forces; creation, its opposite, is a blind torrent. All that is required of it is that it keeps flowing, whatever “it” is. There is, therefore, a conceptual weakness at the heart of creativity. Mastery features objective markers; creativity has none in particular. Anything, whether trivial or precious, can count as some sort of creation. In terms of creativity only, a child who hums a little ditty of his own contrivance is being as creative as Beethoven composing the 5th Symphony. For artists who regard creativity as the sufficient condition of art, this can be dangerous. They will find that creativity creates a great vacuum around it. Once achievement is not the measure of creativity, there is little else that

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defines it either. How does one know when one is or has been creative? What does creativity look like? How do we reach it? Would we even know when we have attained it? Can we ever be creative enough in the absence of benchmarks telling what or when or where creativity is? These quandaries bedevil the life of the modern artist who takes the bait of creativity. One such artist was, according to the critic John Berger, Picasso. Though unquestionably a great painter, Picasso had the misfortune to live in an age that celebrated great artists over great painters. This, according to Berger, encouraged him to think of himself as a creator and of his art as embodying the power of creation. This conviction was fatal to Picasso once he achieved world fame and the press sanctified him as creation incarnate. Says Berger, “Picasso is fascinated by and devoted to his own creativity. What he creates—the finished product—is almost incidental.”9 Picasso, to follow Berger, paints to convey that he is a creator. His pictures are dragooned to testify to his genius while his themes, styles, and periods (blue, rose, Cubist, crystal, classical, and Surrealist) are stage backdrops, the real show being the baritone aria of his creativity. “To draw, you must close your eyes and sing,” said Picasso. “When you come right down to it, all you have is yourself. Yourself is a sun with a thousand fires in your belly. The rest is nothing.”10 “Painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.”11 These obiter dicta do rather evoke a painter who, as Schlegel wanted it, “has his center within himself.” Picasso believed in his power so well that he could not quite imagine artistic weakness. When he depicted Frenhofer for the ink drawings of The Unknown Masterpiece, he drew a Frenhofer as a Herculean he-man who has never known the cramp of self-doubt. This, according to Berger, was Picasso’s hubris and downfall which after 1946 found the artist “condemned to paint with nothing to say”—nothing apart from the fact that he was Picasso the creative genius.12 Before we delve into the perils of creativity, we should understand why creativity in the twentieth century gained the prestige we know it to have still. The specter of totalitarianism, which during the first half of the century spread over half of Europe, certainly has something to do with it. It put democracies on guard against the idea of authority. There evidently ran a deep craving for subjugation among the masses, enough indeed to think that the future of democracy hinged on producing a creative-minded citizenry, searching, curious, imaginative, and antiauthoritarian. Rousseau’s ideas about education came back in fashion, and the intelligentsia dug out its inner Émile who was taught to hate books and trust his impulses.13 Educational Rousseauism cast a spell on generations of psychologists from Jean Piaget to Donald Winnicott who made creativity the sine qua non of the good life and, of course, of art. To be artistic was, first of all, to connect with the creative child within. As Piaget said, “If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterize

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children before adult society deforms them.”14 Training, apprenticeship, learning were such deforming forces, to be opposed by the healthy nescience of spontaneous creativity which, among other things, needed to pass no exam to prove itself. On the contrary, it rejected all proofs of compliance and demonstrations of admitted competence for being inimical to health. “Living creatively is a healthy state, and compliance is a sick basis for life,” said Winnicott in 1971.15 To comply is to betray the healthy self, which is the only self we should care to have and comes to us by unleashing creativity. For as Winnicott explained, “It is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”16 Happily, this rendezvous with the inner bon sauvage was within universal reach. As the Romantic poet Novalis had said in the eighteenth century, “Every person is meant to be an artist,” and as Joseph Beuys decreed in the twentieth century, “Everyone is an artist.”17 A generous proposition, to be sure, which is the least to expect from an equality-loving age. Winnicott again, “The creative impulse is . . . something that is present when anyone—baby, child, adolescent, adult, old man or woman—looks in a healthy way at anything or does anything deliberately, such as making a mess with faeces or prolonging the act of crying to enjoy a musical sound.”18 Few, then, will be those turned away from the playroom of creativity, and few indeed will be those who cannot call themselves artists in potentia. Now it can consist of making a mess with feces, now of sitting on a chair very still (both pieces of performance art). The important thing is to do it in the spirit of creativity, whereupon there is nothing that stands in the way of its becoming art. What the legend of genius was to the aristocratic age, the legend of creativity is to the age of the demos: an elaborate compliment. In fact, serious cognitive psychology shows that creativity of the nontrivial sort is depressingly rare, and remaining a child at heart is no recipe for producing valuable work—one has to put in the long apprenticeship, no fewer than the 10,000 hours, according to the current golden mean, which is itself no guarantee of talent.19 But it is little to say that in the twentieth century this ethic of craft and apprenticeship was bowled aside by the mood of liberation which took William Blake’s formula as its marching order: “Sooner murder an Infant in its Cradle than nurse unacted Desires.”20 Salvation, moral and artistic, lay in restoring the expressive self to natural full throttle. To this restoration Surrealism dedicated itself in the 1920s and 1930s, pioneering various techniques, from écriture automatique to cadavres exquis and psychic disorientation, to trick our conscious mind and release the unself-conscious creator within. Surrealism made its way into the New York art scene in the 1940s by way of European immigrés artists (Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Marc Chagall, Kurt Seligmann, André Breton, etc.), and the meeting of old-world rebellion and new-world libertarianism produced the school of art known as Abstract Expressionism. Psychotherapy was as crucial to a painter’s prospects as a blue-chip gallery and the friendship of

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critic Harold Rosenberg. “The source of my painting is the unconscious,” declared Jackson Pollock several years into Jungian psychotherapy.21 The unconscious was more or less a word for the irrepressibly, wildly creative foundation of the psyche. And the trick was to tap the direct artery. Qua unconscious, the artistic process couldn’t logically be a matter of creative deliberation. “When I am in my painting I’m not aware of what I am doing. . . . I try to let it come through.”22 What “it” was mattered less than the belief it had to come out, for both art and felicity rode on it. The latter because suppressing “it” was averse to human nature; the former because, as the phrase “abstract expressionist” implied, art consisted of ejecting (exprimere) pressured contents without the interposition of too much aesthetic thought and specification. The unconscious material, as Rothko said, is our “primitive fears and motivations,” “an unknown world” it would not do to altogether bare.23 Mostly, it was a matter of greeting the release of pent-up forces, of being “immediate” and “direct”—“naive,” in the sense recommended by Schiller and Baudelaire. Pollock never being much of a talker, his Jungian therapist suggested he came to his appointments with sketches and drawings that were thought to be the direct ejecta of the artist’s deep self. Art or spills—it wasn’t much different. Through it all, the artist was to silence know-how, knowledge, and experience. As Pollock fumbled to explain, “I approach painting the same way as one approaches drawing—it’s direct . . . the more immediate, the more direct, the greater of possibilities of making a direct—of making a statement.”24 Everyone was an artist then; but the trick was not to be too artistic about it. Thus for the method. Whether it works over the long term, whether it helps the artist develop beyond the initial “statement,” which all too often became the final trademark statement—that is another question. Creation undertaken to showcase creativity is a ghost ship chasing a mirage. An artist of Picasso’s genuine technical genius could count on the chase being always spectacular, but not every artist of the twentieth century had his training and talent, and in them the scramble for creativity became a distressing conundrum. Creative orphism indeed wore hard on painters of the New York Renaissance like Pollock and Rothko, still more Barnett Newman and Clifford Still, who were never great draftsmen or subtle colorists to start with. Good technique can carry an artist through a dry patch; but where he relies solely on spontaneous automatism, a dry patch means total eclipse. There is nothing to sustain and assist momentary fatigue or doubt or temporary recalibration. Hesitation becomes a moral failing, which shows the artist to be shy of being hale and authentic. Fruitlessly will the creator recoup spontaneity because spontaneity is a contradictory aim. The very search for it puts it off. Also, spontaneity is a paranoid ideal that is seldom pure enough—especially not when you make it your purpose. A new type of moral blackmail, no less tyrannical for being self-imposed, sets in: be authentically creative, or else. This injunction leads to gestures of wild

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expressive defiance and desperate trickery that aims at helping the creator jump out of his own awareness. “I am nature,” Pollock said and well, he wasn’t. Nature does not congratulate itself for creating, nor worries about it nor aims at it. Pollock is never less nature-like than when he tries to be so. Flying from this paradox, painting becomes a Laocoonian wrangle with the serpent of self-consciousness. Expression is literally slung at the canvas straight from the elbow in a gesture of self-repudiation. The result is impressive because it is self-defeating, a tragic effort to wrestle out of one’s own tentacles. Compound this with the realization that, should surrender to the unconscious be total, it would not bring freedom. As the Abstract Expressionist Motherwell was right to say, “To give oneself over completely to the unconscious is to become a slave.”25 This slavery hangs over even the most intrepid gestures of Abstract Expressionism. It isn’t so much that the artist puts himself at the mercy of incontrollable forces; in the balance of things, this loss of agency may just be proof of natural creativity. It is rather that the artist submits to the fateful tyranny of spontaneity, of being uniquely and authentically direct. Having to speak from the heart, he effectively concedes his powerlessness. If he fails, it is because he wasn’t born an artist. Spontaneous creation is thus a school of fatalism and submission that plays havoc on its more trusting graduates. Pollock had virtually stopped painting by the time the mixture of booze and motorcar killed him; Gorky, Nicholas de Staël, and more famously Rothko committed suicide, plagued by what he called his frustrations. Another problem with creativity was the contradiction in searching for it. What is creativity? Essentially it is the ability to create. Chasing after it is nonsensical. Either one pursues it creatively, which is the only way to pursue it, and in which case one already has it; or one should not pursue it at all, least of all in the hope that piously focusing on creativity will make one more creative. This is like hoping that courting tallness will make one a bit taller. Actually there is reason to fear that, in matters of creativity, the opposite holds true: to fixate on it cramps the creative activity that might have been. Finally, there is the problem of indeterminacy. An Abstract Expressionist picks up the brush to communicate that he is being expressive—that energy, release, creative freedom, “the whole of man’s experience” is happening, as Rothko said. But what is this mysterious entity? Rothko welcomed the day when “the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man’s experience is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, . . . the whole of man’s experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea.”26 Fatally, this idea knows no boundary. It is the vague feeling of being a creative human being, of sensing, thinking, expressing. This means that there is nothing that the painting isn’t. Creativity thereby deprives itself of one of its help-meet, which is constraint. Constraints channel, challenge,

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test, and goad an artist’s strength.27 They give the creator something to reject and something to act on. The mere idea of releasing one’s creative humanity, by contrast, offers little for the artist to sieve or channel or counteract. On what ground, given the lifting of conscious deliberation, would he give preference to one expression over the other? Perplexity ensues, and soon repetition and stagnation. With little to draw from except for the fact that he is being creative, the artist is reduced to the same “statement.” “The intimacy between the creation and the creator” which, according to Rothko, was half the miracle of painting becomes a smothering embrace.28 Not coincidentally expressive creation-for-its-own-sake produced numbingly repetitious work—an art of trademark statements and signature styles, often charitably billed “mature” styles, the Pollock supernova, the Rothko stack of tranquility, the Newman stripe, the Toby fizz, the Still serrated rip, the Kline inky three-strokes, and so on, but which are in fact terminal ideas. The statement swallows the artist who is powerless to change it. In a bitter paradox, the heroic symphony of creativity ticks to a timid metronome. Though a boon to brand recognition, this monotony must have weighed heavily on the painter. The viewer is normally invited to see transcendent serenity in Rothko’s color fields. All the same, the terribly predictable formula must have felt like house arrest to the artist. Twenty years of trying, and failing to get beyond, the same “idea”: by the time he painted his final near-black monochromes, the Rothko horizon looked more and more like a wailing wall. Creativity looked in the mirror and found that there was nothing there, some dark emptiness, an abstraction indeed that should have remained a seat-filler term for the making of art, rather than its holy grail. So pervasive and deeply engrained was the mythology of creativity, however, that when an artist ran on empty and faced a wall, the event did not lead to reexamine the premise that unbound creativity is the summum bonum of art. Instead, the legendry sprang a supporting story. It is the legend that artistic blockage is inherent to art and of great expressive effect too. The wall needed not be a fatal problem; by critical alchemy, it could transform into artistic gold.

9 The Legend of Artistic Block

Though “creative block” is an invention of mid-twentieth-century psychology, the idea of it goes back to Romanticism. It is reasonable to assume artists everywhere have always known fallow and lackadaisical periods; only with the Romantics did they begin to expatiate on the topic and compose art on the subject of being blocked. Before then, artists were also artisans, and even poets admitted that craft could go twice the length of inspiration. Besides, how an artist had a patron or an audience to please, and this public, strange as it sounds today, was of more paramount interest than his private compositional worries. No more than a silversmith or cabinetmaker is expected to make heavy weather of their difficulties, a poet or painter served the product. This situation ended with the great emotional efflux of Romanticism, which blew aside the ethos of craft and lauded the excellence of soul barring. A writer henceforth had to be a great deal more than a fine wit and a wordsmith; he was expected to host the Muse. It is then artistic block rolled onto the scene. In his autobiography, Stendhal recalls the years he wasted waiting for Romantic inspiration to alight from the sky when he should have been honing his craft. “If I had mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Then I would have used ten years of my life effectively instead of wasting them like an idiot waiting for inspiration.”1 Ten years waiting for the mermaids to sing when he could have got down to Penelope’s work routine instead: Stendhal doesn’t quite say that seeking inspiration is the surest way to kill it but does imply that practice makes fruitful and that he would have better spent the decade honing his craft. This, however, is not the advice the Romantic generation heeded, which went chasing or waiting for inspiration, thinking and singing about inspiration, and finally the absence thereof. As we have seen in Chapter 4, great Romantic poetry sprang out of this pining for expressiveness, which means that the “stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief” (Coleridge) was often feigned, or at least not a state

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coincident with poetry. Yet what happened when really the artist was stuck and the Muse refused her voice? The legend of artistic block came to the rescue. The phrase “artist’s block” was coined in 1947 by the Austrian-born Manhattan psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler who brought in his luggage the axiom that a civilized being is to be blocked (in it, the inner savage has been suppressed by the straight-laced superego). To this essentially pessimistic philosophy, young America offered a solution, and Norman O. Brown’s publishing success of 1959, Life against Death, struck the note of optimistic recovery: unhappiness and neurosis, which Freud believed intrinsic to human life, could be defeated by giving free play to instinctual activity, sexual freedom, and spontaneity. Brown followed Bergler’s idea that, once the blocking component identified (Bergler faulted a milk-denying mother, together with sundry anal and oral congestions), the psychic plug could be pulled out, and the individual reinstated to full creative flow.2 This flow sometimes admitted quite literal meanings. In On Not Being Able to Paint, a psychological classic of 1950 (and contemporary to Pollock’s breakthrough One: Number 31), trained psychoanalyst Marion Milner likened creative block to constipation, citing “clinical evidence which seem to show that, particularly in poets and artists who are inhibited in their works, there has been a catastrophic disillusion in the original discovery that their faeces are not as lively, as beautiful, as boundless, as the lovely feelings they had in the giving of them.”3 It was all about orifices and how to keep them open. “In some patients the difficulty in coming to trust and have faith in the fact of the creative forces within themselves is intimately bound up with their unconscious conflicts over masturbation phantasies. They come to feel they have no reason to trust in the goodness of the ‘baby’ which will result from that internal intercourse.”4 In plain English, creativity was a good shit, and artistic block the mistaken belief that one cannot have it all out. It came from holding onto the stuff that Victorian schoolmarms told us not to fling about. The recipe of art was to trust the polymorphous nursling within; it was to bask in “the blissful surrender to this all-out body-giving of infancy.”5 In sum, art-making was Rousseau’s little Émile plus Nietzsche’s mighty Dionysus minus the potty-training. There, roughly, is where we find the American artist and writer of mid-century, astride on the commode between agony and ecstasy, fighting the id’s good fight against the Grendel of repression. This psychology made an Eden out of unreflective omnipotence and a pathology out of deliberation. But what if the plug refuses to budge? What if, of a more retentive or doubting or pessimistic nature, an artist finds she simply cannot relieve herself? To this predicament, there was always the solution of making a statement out of her inability to drop a statement. Enter artistic block. Enter, courtesy of Life Magazine, the furrow-browed creator smoking portentously at the typewriter or gloomily eyeing his canvas. No artist was

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ever not blocked; and no great artist shunned confrontation with blockage; all accepted, indeed welcome, its groaning via crucis. Great blockage was, in some fashion (and a fashion it was), proof of greatness—the seriousness of the blockage being proportional to the volcanic pressure within. Under such auspices, it was understandably disadvantageous for an artist to play down, or even cut short, his block. By and by, art’s “raid on the inarticulate” turned into a case for inarticulacy, and the battle with blockage turned into an art of blockage. *

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The blockage-that-dares-speak-its-name is not, strictly speaking, a Modernist invention. It is a product of modern art—of the fact of artists becoming aware of themselves as creative, rather than merely mechanical, forces. I believe Hamlet is, in some fashion, a rumination of blockage, as is Don Quixote. One showed the tragic side of it, the other the comic. In a way, no worthwhile human endeavor is ever easy and this goes for art too, though we hear more about the travails of art rather than those of, say, dentistry or beekeeping, because artists are in the business of self-expression. They never communicate without communicating something of their complicated awareness of communicating. After Hamlet and Don Quixote, Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67) is an example of art reflecting on the impediment of expression. Its title notwithstanding, this novel contains precious little of Tristram’s life and still less of his opinions. It is an open question whether it tells a story or gets ready for it. Its overarching theme is progeniture, obstetrics, birthing, and the occlusion thereof. Stern tries to write his way to his hero’s day of birth and get the story underway—out of the creative womb and through the narrative birth canal—but things get in the way. Entire chapters tell the reader about birthing difficulties, the trouble with forceps (loss of a nose), which parallels other losses related to the generative faculty (Uncle Toby’s loss of manhood by a cannon ball). Meanwhile Tristram is not born and his life’s story waits for the get-go and the novel belies its title: it postpones the life it is about. Sterne maintains a bright and jockey tone, but it may well be that it covers up for some self-doubt about his storytelling powers. Sterne writes brilliantly about situations, in compensation for not knowing how to unfold them. Long-winded disquisitions, arcane disputations, academic marginalia, and hair-splitting make up for it. He is blocked, brilliantly so, but the heart of his comedic novel-about-the-pains-of-begetting-a-story is not so comic. It is the perplexity of arriving too late: too late to write a straight-up bildungsroman and too late to write a parody of the bildungsroman, which Henry Fielding had done ten years before, and Voltaire nailed in the same year Sterne conceived Tristram Shandy. What, then, could Sterne do except write about a jammed bildungsroman?

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To his credit, Sterne plays it for laughs and, in this sense, is humble and selfdeprecating about his profession. A few decades later, when Romanticism made all matters of artistic creation terribly serious and artist-focused, such levity was out of the question. Gustave Flaubert was one such postRomantic writer who, after Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Sterne, made an art of his incompetence and disenchantment with art. His first masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1856), is a story of cruel disillusionment. Flaubert shares his heroine’s starved and shattered idealism. The girl Emma who for a long time mooned over Romantic novels but wakes up one day to realize she is a country doctor’s wife, and that life is inescapably gray, flat, and dull—hers is also the story of a writer who once dreamed in poetic pink but knows he must write in prosaic brown, the brown of realist fiction, of the fiction that will not dream, will not make fireworks of fancy and inspiration. But Flaubert did not make himself colorless and uninspired simply to be true to an artistic style (realism) or to the story of a provincial life soaked in boredom. Flaubert wrote a story of dullness as way of reckoning with the dullness within, what he feared to be his own lack of creative spark. Mental torpor isn’t unique to the world of Madame Bovary; it is the subject to Flaubert’s entire oeuvre, whether it speaks through the aimless hero of Sentimental Education, the obduracy of St Julien l’Hospitalier, the robotic goodness of Félicité in A Simple Heart, or the no less robotic learnedness of Bouvard and Pécuchet. The senility of convention, the torpor of bovine Bovarism, the idiot spinning in his mental hamster wheel were Flaubert’s obsession: they are things he wrote about and, most importantly, wrote with. He told stories under a cloud of doubt that he had nothing special to say and no great talent to express it. “Individuality,” he said, “of this most important quantity in the life of an artist I am completely devoid. I am a non-entity and try as I may to produce an idea of my own, I am utterly lacking.”6 We know this to be, not a one-off crisis of confidence but, the filigree of his entire life and a leitmotiv of his correspondence. Que je suis bête! (I am so stupid), he often said—which is one thing. It is another thing entirely to write on it again and again, indeed to write in order to bear proof of his bêtise: “What a way to live, spending my time telling myself that I’m dumb and bearing proof of it.”7 This dumbness in fact had a name: the inability to write. So Flaubert’s artistic enterprise rested on a paradox, which was to squeeze words out of wordlessness. No wonder it was hard going. “I am feeling utterly miserable, humiliated by my own impotence. . . . I have run out of ideas. No use racking my brains. I can’t squeeze out a thing. I have spent the entire day . . . not only unable to write a single line but also quite incapable of having a single idea. Empty, completely empty.”8 And again, “You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” That word, it bears saying, was sometimes suck in the verbal birth canal for weeks on end and then had to be scrapped. “I will

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have spent from July to late November writing one scene,” he raged over his trickle.9 “I’m closing down, I’m fading out, my memory is going and I realize I no longer know what I once knew. . . . My sentence no longer flows; I have to rip it out, and it tears my insides.”10 “My Bovary isn’t going too well. Two pages in one week!!! Sometimes the discouragement is enough to do oneself in.”11 “This book is tormenting me so much that sometimes it makes me physically ill. . . . At times I feel I am suffocating. . . . and I’m often tempted to say bugger the whole thing. . . . What a bloody accursed idea it was to take on a subject like that.”12 “There is a total lack of ideas inside. However much I ransack my brain, my heart and my senses, nothing comes out. Today I have spent the whole day, up until now, splayed in various spots of my study unable to write a single line, not even the stir of an idea. Empty, completely empty.”13 There are pages and pages of this, an epistolary litany of despair about the blank page and the desert between his ears. To hear Flaubert, his artistic life was one long dry spell. Long enough, in fact, to make us suspect that it greased an artistic wheel somewhere. Impotence was a story Flaubert needed to tell himself in order to keep going. He kept writing because he felt he couldn’t. In a moment of lucidity, he sees that “the greater my difficulty in writing, the more audacious I become.”14 And the more audacious he becomes, of course, the more difficulties he encounters: “As I go deeper into the work, the more I see the difficulties and the clearer I see the flaws.”15 Practice, for him, makes imperfect: “Why is it that as I seemingly come up to the level of past masters, the art of writing itself seems to be ever less doable, and I am ever more disgusted by anything I make?”16 Why indeed? Van Gogh confessed to a similar feeling: “You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter: you can’t do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.”17 Who wants to be an idiot? Apparently some great artists. That should have us suppose that there are benefits to a blank page or canvas. One benefit is of course originality. An idiot is by definition incompetent, and if he doesn’t get things right at least he does them his own way— innocently. Incompetence is a way of being authentic and modern. Those artists like Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Derain who painted like primitives and “wild beasts,” they dared being idiots of the brush in order to be original, to step into expression as if in a foreign land. This sense of outsidership is essential to the art called “modern.” A Romantic-modern artist is alienated from her medium—in fact injured by it. Flaubert again, “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while we long to make music to melt the stars.”18 There are so many sublime things I could say if only language did not stand in the way! This disconnect between intention and expression led art beyond realism (which assumes that expression reliably carries intent and perception) into Modernism,

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where the alienated artist feels confined and betrayed by his medium. Most realists (Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Maupassant, Trollope, the Goncourts, Zola) thought they used language to penetrate and represent reality. A Modernist avant la lettre, Flaubert felt that language walled him in, playing this immurement now as comedy (Bouvard and Pécuchet), now as bourgeois tragedy (Emma Bovary), now as hagiography (Félicité, St Julien, Flaubert himself). Unsurprisingly, the novel he admired most of all was Don Quixote—the story of a holy fool besotted by a linguistic spell (the chivalric romance). Trapped inside language, Flaubert finally embraced his prison. He wrote pages and pages of dialogue that swaps nothing but clichés. He also dreamed of writing a book in which not a single word or idea would be his—a novel of quotations, banalities, and truisms, which basically took the form of Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), his last novel, and one as close to high Modernism yet without the label. At this stage Flaubert wrote to signify that he had given up trying to wrestle out of the straightjacket of expression. He wrote to say that he was blocked, a hostage, a man who stares at a prison wall. *

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Contemporary to Bouvard and Pécuchet, Mallarmé’s poetry is where the silencing of creative agency becomes the raison d’être of poetry. One writes to say that one is not writing, at least not writing to express oneself, or to unfold a story, or to impart meaning. This leads to the literature of impotence of high Modernism most characteristic of Samuel Beckett’s prose fiction—novels like The Unnamable (1953) which, two hundred years after Tristram Shandy and one hundred years almost to the date after Madame Bovary, rhapsodizes on the pros and cons of going on. A nameless voice keeps saying it has nothing to say, nothing to go on, yet also nothing to stop saying there is no point in saying it. Artistic obstruction stares at its own blockage and sees nothing else. “Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on”: thus starts The Unnamable and goes on from there, or doesn’t: it is language looking for a plot, an intention in search of substance until two hundred pages of unbroken print later, it stops without quite ending: “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, you can’t go on, I’ll go on.”19 Creative impotence wallows in martyrdom, resentful of its own speaking, yet unable to let go. Stendhal’s ten wasted years of waiting for something to say stretch to the length of life itself. Then is artistic blockage distilled to its ultimate form short of the blank page. Literature is impotent to “say” the world but does not surrender to silence. Instead it goes on expressing its mournful failure to reach the world, sick with a linguisticist philosophy that regards human expression is a closed system. Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe): this warning is

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etched on every pipe, piano, poem, or palace of high-Modernist making. It is the reminder that we never know things themselves, but images of them. Failure to reach the world, to pull oneself out of the glue of subjectivity—the Hamlet malady: it is the “human condition,” the title of painting (1934) by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte which depicts a window whose view on the landscape is blocked by a painting that depicts the selfsame landscape. Barred from reality, this also is the message of the nouveau-Roman wall-ofwriting literature and the minimalist wall-of-painting. Human conditions, however, come and go like fashion. They are choices or, more often still, useful adaptations. There is nothing logically unavoidable about the so-called non-referentiality of language. In fact, by its own logic, it is not an objective fact of the world, but an idea, a style of thinking about which we must say that it favors claustrophobia and alienation. But since a choice it is, then the cui bono question necessarily arises: What purpose does blockage serve? A salient trait of artistic block is that it is prone to verbosity. Nothing likes to talk about itself like the impossibility to write, to paint, or to represent. It is also of great interest to art and literary critics because it pushes art into meta-expression, which is their hunting grounds. Scarcely can an artist pay the critic higher compliment than by saying that art is a kind of criticism, and criticism a form of higher art. But the artist, too, derives an advantage. Though it seems as though the art of blockage signals the wane of Romantic grandeur, in reality it is artistic grandiosity finding new ways of expressing it. Through blockage the artist monopolizes the work of art and makes his creative condition into the centerpiece. “I’ll go on”: thus the author says that he is not done with it, that it isn’t for the reader to take possession of the work, that the artist still exercises interminable ascendency over the product. Cocooned inside an infinite utterance, the “blocked” artist blots out the public. Not coincidentally blockage art is responsible for one of the most jealously close-meshed styles of writing short of legalese—for example, the wall-of-writing novels of Joyce, Beckett, Blanchot, and the 1950s’ nouveau Roman. The run-on sentence that stretches from page length to book length exhausts the reader’s attention. We strain to cast our mind back to the previous sentence, and, with nary a plot to organize our interest, we can’t anticipate what comes next. Exhausted, we capitulate, submit to the rhapsodic spell. Thus, also in the painting-without-a-context of Abstract Expressionism—large-scale gyrations, fogscapes, nebulae, cosmic infinities that have no up or down, no hither and thither, and no shared border with reality. This is known as the “immersive” quality of high modern painting art, which, though the oceanic bath be pleasurable, nevertheless counsels surrender. We are not to apprehend, let alone judge, the overall effect; we are to dive and drown in the painterly galaxy. It presents itself as a total experience and us as its spellbound devotees. We either tune in and drop out or are left in the cold, but in any case we leave judgment at the door. “The

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demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works,” replied James Joyce to the question whether anyone should be expected to understand Finnegans Wake, the piece of Modernist art which least wants to be understood but recited like holy writ, like the infinite word of God.20 Yet this infinity is not transcendent; on the contrary, it purports to offer an infinity of immanence, of plain thereness about which there is, on our end, little to say, opine, or contradict. Thus, Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which urged us to stop looking into art and simply accept the blunt fact of it. What’s there is all there is. Epigones of Black Square return like a hypnotist’s pendulum throughout the twentieth century (Ad Reinhardt’s black canvases, Robert Rauschenberg’s white ones, Agnes Martin’s beigey squares, Jean Dubuffet, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Yves Klein, Rothko’s last paintings, Ellsworth Kelly, etc.). It prepares the triumph of taciturnity that is minimalism—an art of geometric reticence, monoliths, slabs of paint, steel or text, one-note symphonies and silent sonatas to which we can say nothing since they mean to say nothing to us, at least nothing articulate. We can speak about or around Black Square—historically, culturally, anthropologically; but it is useless to redescribe it, locate ourselves in it, trace a path to and out of it. Either we accept it entirely or we don’t, in which case we are not part of its magic and simply don’t get “it.” What “it” is, again, is an artist who wears his silence like papal infallibility, if not the sibylline mien of nature herself. The minimalist composer John Cage confessed he pursued music precisely because he wasn’t getting anywhere with it. This, he recalls, was his road to Damascus: “After two years, it became clear that I had no feeling for harmony. . . . Therefore he [Arnold Schoenberg, his teacher] said I’d never be able to write music.—‘Why not?’—‘You’ll come to a wall and won’t be able to get through.’” To this, Cage answered, “Then I’ll spend my life knocking my head on that wall.”21 The obvious hurdle of having no ear for harmony didn’t end his musical career; it started it. His blockage—that was the very reason to make music, and soon its topic and theme and sound. The paradox hinged on a Romantic wager that he who knocks his head against the wall of expression truly faces the challenge of art. Unlike virtuosos (before whom expression bends and bows like trees in an enchanted forest), a true artist accepts the rigid unfitness of human expression. “Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; . . . For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there?” (Virginia Woolf). This giving-up is the modern artist’s glory—the glory of defeated rebellion, of Sisyphean resignation. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Yet, if the picture of a pipe is not a pipe, it is not nothing either. It is a picture of a pipe that leaves the pipe out of the picture. But where is the pipe then? Out there, sublimely beyond our reach, in some longed-for realm called “reality.” Reality is thus re-sanctified by its absence.

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The more bounded our view, the more wondrous is what lies beyond. Consider this other painting by Magritte, The Hunters at the Night’s Edge: two tweed-and-wellies huntsmen push and claw at a bare wall whose edge, at the right side of the painting, reveals a ravishingly twilit horizon. Walls are naturally fascinating, for the reason that obfuscation seems to withhold revelation (e.g., Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” 1915). Why are these hunters butting their penitent heads against the wall? The answer is simple: because it is their way of touching (or hunting) infinity. Thus, the wall and the boundless horizon are two in one, and this is what minimalism finally discovered—how to have the Romantic Friedrich and the Modernist Malevich, inspiration and blockage in the same package. *

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Two paintings by Matisse can help us illustrate this transformation. Both pictures depict the window of the artist’s studio in the French Riviera. The earlier one, Open Window, Collioure of 1905, celebrates painting as a window onto the world: a peach-red window frame with a sill full of geraniums opens to an ivy-laced embrasure, and little skiffs can be seen dancing on sparkle of sea and sky in the distance. The second painting, Porte-Fenêtre à Collioure (1914), is more or less contemporaneous to Malevich’s flat monochrome square. It is the window of nine years earlier, only this time at night. Perhaps for this reason we are at pains to make out a window—but instead five vertical strips of different widths and solid colors (blurred blue, black, faded pink, and emerald). That the title speaks of a window simply makes it known that ceci n’est pas une fenêtre (this is not a window) but the ghost of one, an elegy to windows. Here the word “abstraction” seems to invite itself. But I do not think that this painting has abstracted the window and the outside world. In fact, it aspires to join the outside world, to become a fact on a par with the other facts of the world, and thus, in this sense, overcome the separation between image and reality. It suggests that the wall of painting is about denying and erasing the gap between self and world. Blockage is good: for when the human voice stops representing the world, when it falls silent, then it acquires something of the properties of the world, which is that it does not speak or represent itself. Thus, the wall vanishes. Mark Rothko, master of “painterly-surface art,” the “all-over” canvases and “color-field paintings,” staked his art on this transmutation of blockage into infinity, of the wall into horizon. The spark of Rothko’s work was, by his own recounting, the desire to impart a feeling of immurement: After I had been at work for some time . . . I realized that I was much influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo’s walls in the staircase room of the Medicean Library in Florence. He achieved just the kind of feeling

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that I’m after—he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.22 At the origin, then, was a wish to enclose viewers in a wall of painting and to make them, like the two wall-butting hunters in Magritte’s picture, admit the towering physical might of his art. This ambition underscores the cultic tendency of Modernist art, which wants to be not an object but a total experience, an environment, a reality. The wall of painting is art taking dominion over the conditions in which it is perceived. It wants to be our horizon, to stretch as far as we perceive, so that we belong to it, and not it to us. This perhaps is the magic Rothko spoke of when he said that the artist today must be capable of performing miracles.23 This miracle is the transmutation of painterly painting into cosmic presence and of bounded material non-representational art into infinite art.24 Rothko, for one, touted the religious potency of his Laurentian walls: “Transcendental experiences become possible,” he said, and “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”25 This is religious experience alright, though one without a religion, that is, deity and community; it is religious experience boiled down to a vague feeling of encompassment and infinity. The viewer (a disciple, a pilgrim, a votary) is in the presence of something somehow, a something that will not state its meaning, a thing that sits silently, a floating field of colors, like a landscape at dusk. We are meant to have what Modernists and Bloomsbureans called a “moment of being” when we stop wondering why the world is the way it is and marvel at the fact that it is. A rose is a rose is a rose—even a rose made by human hands. The fact that art is human-made once justified why it was relevant to bring up the questions, What does this work of art mean? What does the artist seek to communicate? But the mysterious, nearsilent wall-of-painting waves away the question of meaning. Born of a crisis of expressiveness, it makes inexpressiveness into an odor of sanctity, and likens art to the silent cosmos, to the hidden God. The miracle is performed: the work of art becomes “the thing itself” as Virginia Woolf said. She only dreamed that “the whole world is a work of art”;26 for her mid-century Manhattan heirs, the goal was to make the work of art into the whole world. Thus, the seemingly modest art of minimalist retraction harbored the supreme ambition of standing in for the world, of possessing the sheer factness of “Being.”

10 The Legend of Transcendence

By the legend of transcendence, I mean to highlight two related tendencies in modern aesthetic discourse. One is the belief according to which art can elude the condition of artifice and constitute a “presence” in its own right. The other is that, constituting this presence, art transcends the realm of speech, meaning, and communication and embodies a form of “silence.” Let us begin with presence. Talk of presence in painting and sculpture derived from a new focus on form over content: how a painter represented, his approach, his style, the thingness of his brushstroke, the quiddity of his expression, the materiality of his picture—all this became of greater consequence than the subject matter. Indeed, recognizable objects and beings could very well fade out of the picture, which they progressively did in the last decade of the nineteenth century and disappeared completely with Malevich and Kandinski in the second decade of the twentieth. As representation dwindled, presentation, that is, the way in which an artist made her manner present, gained prominence. The brush that declares itself, the glob, clot, or smear that proudly speaks its name definitely replaced the self-effacing brushwork. By mid-century, the thicker, clottier, grainier a work of art looked, the more fundamentally “present” (as opposed to meekly representational) it was. “What you see is what you see,” said Frank Stella about the new art. This was no reductionist retrenchment at all; in fact, the work of art (what we see) parleyed itself into being all there was to see: not a stand-in, or symbol or representation or of things, but the thing itself. The point was no less than to cancel twenty-four centuries of the Platonic denigration of art for being unreal and artificial. Art—it was as real as life, nay, it reconnected us with the authentic presence, the thereness and beingness of life. Now, aside from its dubious philosophical merit, this notion of “supraaesthetic presence” is founded on an indisputable emotional experience, which is that great works of art do magnetize our attention and instill a sense that we are in the presence of something unique. As to whether this opens a special inroad to “being” itself—this of course warrants a second

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look. The first argument against the idea of presence is that a work of art is never a bare-faced fact but a presented fact. It doesn’t come like the weather or stand there like a mountain. If it feels like a “moment of being,” this being nevertheless comes in parcels of presentation. A moment of being is “being” isolated, aestheticized, framed out of life. Thus, a work of art that insists on its material presence by the same token negates it—just as a mountain would if it could say “look, I am made of rock.” In art what we behold is invariably more than what is there. For all its matter-of-factness, or rather because of it, Malevich’s Black Square was never a black square, but the presentation of a black square, a presentation that prevents it from being merely black and square. It was no use for Ad Reinhardt to paint his own black square in 1960 to signify that he had arrived at a “non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, nonsubjective” level of communication.1 Non-objective it wasn’t for the reason that it signaled itself as this thing rather than that; non-subjective it could not be, for the reason that non-subjectivity shown is non-subjectivity nullified. Anything that is put forward is touched by subjective intent. It is, in this sense, transcendent. Of course, logical contradiction has never impeded the making of art, and there is no reason it should. But that is not the same thing as saying that the claims made by modern art are beyond scrutiny—especially when this claim is no less than to break down the surface of appearance. From the modern painter, we hear that “there is an inherent truth which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented, and this is the only truth that matters” (Matisse);2 from the modern sculptor in this instance, we hear that “what is real is not the external form, but the essence of things” and that “it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface” (Brancusi).3 The idea here is that art must delve under the surface image to touch the thing itself. “I could present a [cigar box] not as I see it but how it exists in its predicate,” said the Expressionist Franz Marc.4 “Painting must forget appearance,” agreed Braque. This recalls Frenhofer’s ambition for a “greatness” that “would shatter external form.” This shattering essentialism is at the heart of the Modernist project and was variously pursued by means of abstraction, reduction, and conceptualization. But here again we come to the question: How does one get past forms by making forms? So long as one addresses oneself to the impersonal universal truth, one is being personal and local. “Art is not the expression of the appearances of reality as we see it, but the expression of true reality and true life, indefinable but realizable in plastics,” said Piet Mondrian.5 It is hard enough picturing how art can go beyond “appearances.” What could be meant by the idea of plastically modeling an indefinable? At best, the artist engages in a process of simplification and intellectual schematization, reducing forms down to their most basic elements. But this is hardly going

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beyond appearances. On the contrary, if Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1923) represents the essence of a bird in flight (“I am within the essence of things themselves,” said Brancusi), this essence, so far as it goes, is very much a form and, as forms go, it is exceedingly form-like, contoured, honed, sleek, tactile, downright caressable.6 If this is what essence looks like, then Yves SaintLaurent is a metaphysician. Simplifying figuration leads to forms designed within an inch of its life. Journeying into essence lands in the ornamental, and Icarus’s supra-phenomenal flight in the office suites and hotel lobbies of the world where modern essentialism indeed is the style of choice, it being ever so stylish. To obviate this un-Romantic outcome, second- and third-generation Modernists ratcheted up the stakes through works of militant roughness— objects like strips of pig iron, blocks of wax, piles of dirt, cement slabs, industrial bits of felt and slack, and odds and ends of blue-collar credibility and none of the salon smartness of a Brancusi or Mondrian. Art brut, arte povera, minimalism, landscape art, the deliberately undertreated, roughhewn look of paintings and sculptures from Rodin and Dubuffet to Serra and Tàpies, and so on, where rust, erosion, fusion, gravity, the immemorial hand of volcanos and ocean tides, anything indeed except pictorial intention, seemingly molded the form: here was the artist as nature and the work of art as the bare thing itself. Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass is 340-ton boulder set on top of a trench where visitors are invited to warily. The behemoth is certainly as raw and unmetaphysical and portentously “present” as any work of art is likely to seem, especially in the land of earthquakes (it hovers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). This is chthonic nature armed with the gravitas of gravity (for which, apparently, Angelinos have a fondness: in 2007 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned Jeff Koons for a life-size dangling locomotive—then balked at the apparently weightier $25-million price tag). Similar gigantism is frequent in the arts of the last forty years, and its utility to the art-as-presence legendry is obvious. A work of art made to the size of a landscape humbles the eye. A landscape surrounds us, places us, objectifies us before we have the first look-around. It is literally the ground of being beneath our feet. Ground, yes—and this is where the essentialist legend comes under strain— but signified ground nonetheless. Our eye doesn’t just fall on it by chance; it has been guided to it and sits in an area marked out for special aesthetic consideration. The landscape in landscape art isn’t the space on both sides of the road; it is that landscape signaled by the road sign “Scenic Lookout.” Heizer’s boulder can never be a mere boulder—and this is why it is called a “mass,” that is, a piece of conceptual theater. Unwieldy as it is, a piece of landscape art stands behind an implied proscenium on an implied stage. This stage is our aesthetic apprehension—an apprehension emboldened to seize up the whole of nature as an aesthetic phenomenon. If landscape art therefore signals anything, it is not our return to the primeval bosom of being

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and presence; rather, it signals an advanced stage of social and technological development where we are poised to comprehend (envelop, dominate, shrink-wrap) nature, as in Christo’s installations. Landscape art is about the miniaturization of distance by air travel and electronic communication. Landscape art does to “presence” what the first photograph of Earth seen from outer space (August 23, 1966) did to nature—clap a frame around it. *

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The legend of presence exposes that the double bind modern art drives itself into when it seeks to be more than art. When a work of painting or sculpture professes to be a mere thing (i.e., to transcend downward), it inescapably makes an image of that intention (and therefore transcends back upward). When, on the contrary, it professes to reach past appearance and touch the universal (i.e., when it transcends upward), it sets this upward flight in an earthbound form. In short, art proves to be more when it wants to be less and to be less when it wants to be more. The upshot seems to be that art doesn’t easily escape its ornamental nature. Art is image: as such, it is a thing, and no plain thing either but a thing symbolic. In plain speech, art is inescapably artsy. This artsiness is the bane of twentieth-century Romantics who like Frenhofer aimed at a “transcendent greatness” that “might shatter external form.” Such a Romantic is, to return to him, Mark Rothko. “Transcendental experiences become possible,” he asserted, and critics and collectors cheered on his “faith in [an artist’s] ability to perform miracles.”7 This is not the place to begrudge artists their grandiosity (a measure of self-faith is necessary for great enterprises). But it is the place to gauge how intention stacks up against results. We can start with an anecdote from Rothko’s career when in the flush of new fame, heady with the “Sublime is Now” drumbeat of New York Expressionists (Barnett Newman had released his famous manifesto in 1948), he took a commission to paint a series of pictures for an upscale restaurant in Manhattan. He got down to work in the spirit that his paintings would “ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.”8 His art, we gather, would throw Mr. Moneybags into religious vertigo, open up the sky above dollar-grubbing America, and illuminate the way. On visiting the soon-to-open venue, however, Rothko abruptly changed his mind and pulled out of the project. Did he then guess that his sublime art would not ruin capitalist appetite after all? Did it also occur to him that his misty color washes actually agreed with the corporate décor? As Boucher to Louis XV, so Rothko to Lehman Brothers. Modern abstraction, sublime or not, matches corporate office walls and the lobbies of smart hotels: its air of cosmic scope concords with the theoretic overview of the Olympians of Wall Street. It shows an image of the world shorn of local asperities and hierarchies by the greatest smoother and translator of all—money.

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After returning his advance to the restaurant owners, Rothko entrusted his sublime appetite-spoiling pictures to museums. He was right that a fashionable restaurant isn’t the best place for prolonged acts of quiet attention. Just the same, his retreat to the safe haven of museums throws doubt on his confidence in the essentialness of his work. How strong is the miraculous presence if contact with profane life besmirches it? Not very strong, it seems, for thereafter Rothko exercised excessive, almost paranoid oversight in the placing of his art, often stipulating that museum directors arrange a Rothko-dedicated room and restrict the number of visitors allowed at any one time in the sanctum sanctorum (these directives obtain to this day in some museums, fifty years after the master’s death). In fact, these specifications are an admission of insecurity. A strong work of art brazens out the encounter with reality. Da Vinci’s Last Supper was designed for a refectory and Boccaccio’s Birth of Venus for a bridal room, and Whistler’s Peacock Room for a shipping magnate’s home, yet none are the worse for it and all are presumably enriched by their tactful acknowledgment of a reality beyond art. Whereas the Modernist shies away from this trial by fire. “Painting is not made to decorate apartments,” said Picasso,9 but this judgment, which invalidates all art not just before the twentieth century, merely confesses that the Modernist fears competition from reality and requires sacred incantation to safeguard its “presence”—a monumental white room to itself in which to unfold, as in installation art, and chase all profane reminder that there is a world outside. In the end, Rothko didn’t trust even the museum (still too redolent of an auction viewing room) to instill the desirable level of sanctity. He grew into the idea that his pictures merited a shrine. The art clerisy agreed: his paintings really “ask for a special place apart, a kind of sanctuary, where they may perform what is essentially a sacramental function.”10 If sacramental it is, then what does it sanctify? Itself, of course, which means it is not sacramental but idolatrous. To the picture we bow because, well, the cultic guardians of art want us to and because a museum has grown into a reverential place anyway, a church for the secular, or perhaps because some instinct in us yearns for the sacred. Still, a doubt remains: How sublime is an art toward which we are urged to show a timid permeability of judgment before encountering? After all, any ordinary object (a tree, a creek, a stone, a piece of bread) can be a lightning rod of divinity so long as the mood is right. Rothko’s stipulation may suggest that he knew what every magician knows, which is that the trick is not in the rabbit disappearing but in the prattle that happens before, after, and around it. Rothko did obtain his very own magician’s dark room in the form of a chapel in Texas. For it (well, not “for it” since the chapel was actually built for them, his paintings), he created his most featureless works to date— plum-black monochrome rectangles which in an office would look like standard-issue wall paneling. Since Rothko painted them for a chapel, they

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were guaranteed a tremulous gaze from the beginning. The incentive was therefore to play the trump card of post-expressive presence to the full. The less there is to see, the more there is to infer and the more the viewer has to supply the missing material. In other words, the less there is to see, the more we are prone to believe. About the Rothko Chapel paintings, there isn’t much to see or say apart from the fact that they are there but that it is the point for it invests the thereness with ultimate significance: it is all there is to see, precisely, it is the all, it is sublime, it is absolute. Of course, that did not stop the chapel of art’s gateway to presence from becoming the “Rothko Chapel,” a one-man museum in all but name. The God to whom we kneel in the Rothko Chapel may well be our desire to transcend art by means of Art. Just the same, the journey takes us back to the cultic aesthetic object. It is God brought to you by the museum clerisy: “Please take care to respect the Chapel by preserving the silence within the Chapel, refraining from using cameras, and maintaining a safe distance from our beloved artwork.”11 After such priestly rustling, it would take a very thick philistine to deny feeling the “presence.” In Europe, the art of presence went less the way of Whitmanesque sublimity and more that of German-tinted philosophy. In his influential essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger intonates that this origin is the origin and that true art has no other aim but that of unveiling being, hence to abolish itself as artifact, whose source is man, and resurrect as being, that is, as everything.12 Soon there was art to be made out of this philosophical “dépassement” of art by art. Thus, Yves Klein of the blue monochromes, blue like the ocean, like the azure, like Vishnu, like cosmic being—a blue not to look at but to bask in. Blue would efface the duality between here and there, subject and object, and just in case we remained stuck on the object, Klein did away with that too and opened an exhibit called “The Void” (1958). “My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner,” Klein said, letting visitors into an empty, freshly white-painted gallery.13 Finally “total liberation” had come. Or so was the official word. For if liberation it was, it surely wasn’t from aesthetics. Klein’s de-objectified art relied on an emphatically designated “empty room.” In other words, the overcoming of art very much asked art to stay there, as the pommel horse under the gymnast. Try to abolish art in the Gare du Nord during the Monday morning rush hour, and good luck to you. The arts of “Presence” need the mental enclosure of aesthetics to operate. All that presence-art does, in the end, is to doubly aestheticize, rather than deaestheticize, experience. For to ask that we experience the absence of art as an aesthetic phenomenon is basically to ask that we regard life itself as an aesthetic phenomenon. Whatever holy thrill we get from it, it surely isn’t from overcoming aesthetics. Valiant (and quixotic), therefore, are the attempts to perform this acrobatic impossibility, most dramatically in countless “art happenings”  (like “The

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Void”) and in performance art—the realest of the real, the nowest of the now, the art form that “involves the artist’s own body and occurs in the real space in which bodies meet and act upon one another.”14 In fact, all the heavy breathing about realness underscores the plain realization that: one, to call people “bodies” doesn’t remove the fact that performance art involves persons who are cognizant of their actions and of their circumstances, in this instance the action and circumstance of performing in a piece of street theater; and two, that performance art carves a ritual space out of everyday space, and that it does more to aestheticize everyday life than everyday life manages to make performance art real and quotidian. There’s a reason why they call it a “performance” after all. The performance artist Terry Fox who feigns a cataleptic trance is merely doing what artists called actors have done since time immemorial: creating make-believe by means of gestures. His body may be real, but the intention that activates it partakes of ritual and fiction. As if aware of this fatal inauthenticity, the performance artist resorts to tactics of ever more visceral realness. He has himself crucified, or shot at, or operated upon (Buren); he slaughters animals with much splattering and slathering of guts and blood before a live audience (Ana Mendieta, Rafael Ortiz, Hermann Nitsch). He fires from the approaches of an airport runaway to down a commercial plane. He nails his penis to a wood panel (Bob Flanagan). If the act is irreparable, then is not it real— really real? Well, to the live creature being dismembered, theirs is certainly the only death they will ever have. It remains that it is staged for our aesthetic and intellectual edification, and if it is shocking, it is because it is part of, and not outside, the artistic ken. Art here does not overcome itself and fuse with life; rather it graphically sacrifices life to the artist’s mad desire to escape the supposedly stifling confines of art. This desire is mad for at least two reasons: first, because art cannot successfully abolish itself without losing claim to our attention (to be consistent, genuinely post-art art should not be seen, heard of, or talked about—least of all by critics); and second, because it is illogical to stop doing something by doing it. To make art in order to stop making art is to whistle in the wind. *

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Given this guarantee, it is astonishing how doggedly Modern and Postmodern art chased this chimera—liberation from art by art. In one way or another the mirage shimmers in nearly every artistic style from primitivism in the 1880s to minimalism in the 1960s. It is a war cry of the avant-garde; it sustains the Surrealists’ idea that art must unfold “beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation” (André Breton). Found art, Conceptual art, Fluxus, Informal art, Tachisme, and Earth art—each tries to slash its way out of art and, for all its giddy gimmickry, so does Pop Art. Pop artist Claes

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Oldenberg spoke of working “for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point,” innocent and oblivious of all the art that’s ever been. 15 Fatally, the wish cancels itself out in the saying. To make art while deliberately omitting to remember it is art is inescapably to remind yourself you are making art. Found art and earth art (even of the non-invasive earthwork type) do no better at escaping aesthetics: while a found object may not have been crafted in the ordinary sense, the gaze we are meant to cast upon the rock pile or trench or wheat field (Smithson, Heizer, de Maria) is earnest, observant, and inescapably aesthetic. Not that this logical bind ruffles the Romantic soul. Post-art art is buoyed by temperament rather than argument, and the temperament it rides on is that of innovation-driven societies. As in technology and politics, so it is in culture: paradigms must be overthrown, and the inconceivable must be given a try. In this domain, art really outperforms its progressive cousins: it can be post-art in a way technology or medicine or social institution can’t afford to be post-technological, post-health, or post-society. The Boeing Company doesn’t make anti-travel planes because it does not trade in imaginary experience and would commit business suicide making anti-plane planes. But such burdensome reality does not obtain in art. There, fictiveness (the giddy lightness of being of art) gives artists license to proclaim themselves non-artists at no investment cost and with good possibility of return on venture. The legend of art-quitting goes back to Romanticism. There was a whiff of it in the famed suicide of English teenage poet Thomas Chatterton in 1770, which inspired elegies (Wordsworth’s “marvelous boy”) and was reckoned a poetic act by later Romantics. Rimbaud left off poetry at the age of twenty-one to go trading coffee in Java and firearms in Abyssinia, never to write a line of verse again. Leaving aside the fact that the move had little to do with poetry, if only in the sense that Rimbaud was done with it, it was not long before his departure became his “silence,” his “renunciation,” a way of doing poetry through the radical means of non-poetry.16 The Romantic John Keats taught the modern generation that poetry lies in the “negative capability,” that is, the aptitude of tarrying in what we do not and cannot know. Genuine art soaks in the ineffable. In the long autumn of Romanticism, that is, modernity, this negative capability mutated into a love of the negative as such. For the Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé, the artistic spirit is never closer to its essence than when it vanishes: first, in the person of the poet who performs his own “elocutionary disappearance” in verse, and next by the poem itself, the ideal subject of which is the void. Never was Rimbaud more poetic than when he left poetry for poetry is a way of articulating silence. Several decades later, it was basically a piece of received wisdom that, in the words of Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, poetry is about “the extremities of language”: “It is extreme language looking back on its

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inner depths, exposing the reverse of speech: silence and non-significance.”17 Beckett wrote entire plays and novels about the futility of expression, the irresistible lure of silence, yet also art’s inability to be silent enough. “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” he said, and so literature at large was a defacement, and repentance over the fact it should be so.18 This was rich stuff for his French admirers, Edmund Jabès and Maurice Blanchot, who regarded literature as uniquely concerned with its inability to represent or say anything about the world. The best the writer can do is repeat this message ad nauseam and leave literature in the shoals of its glorious impotence (Blanchot called it “death”).19 In a more nihilistic vein, his compatriot George Bataille urged littérateurs to “speak a language equal to zero, a language that would be the equivalent of nothing, a language that returns to silence.”20 It is not said whether this recommendation itself is a language that is “equivalent of nothing” but the feeling, and the fascination with the cessation of all articulate expression and sense is clear, enough to make Harold Rosenberg remark (unfortunately without a hint of mischief) that recent “French poetry has a lot to say about silence.”21 Silence, so a religious anti-humanist prejudice holds, has a purity and dignity unknown to speech. “In silence man most readily preserves his integrity,” said the thirteenth-century Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart. Silence is pure. “Silence,” Rothko said, “is so accurate.”22 As to what it is accurate about, this too is passed over in silence. Perhaps it is the old nihilistic grudge against existence—that it should never have begun and that the world would have been happier without us in it. The poet speaks, the painter paints to say how good it would be if we could stop speaking and painting. Thus, across this Lethe we go—“into our deep, dear silence” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). In the visual arts, minimalism was the aesthetic movement most (paradoxically) demonstrative of the diet of expressive attenuation. Starting in the mid-1950s, painters and sculptors worked to bleaching away line, color, expressiveness, and intention from their works. The last station would be, ideally, one where almost nothing is said, sketched, or essayed. “The true painter of the future,” said Yves Klein in 1959, “will be a mute poet who will write nothing but recount without detail and in silence an immense picture without limit.”23 It’s just as well this painter doesn’t venture out of the future: he would find that, while mute poetry is hard enough, a picture without limit can never be seen as a picture (see previous chapter). But such ambition is made of emotion more than logic, and an overriding emotion of the post–Second World War period was anti-humanist, transcendental, posthistorical—a sublime Romanticism freed from human presence, Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog minus the wanderer: in Susan Sontag’s phrase, an “aesthetics of silence.”24 Post-human as it sounded, this aesthetic (in Sontag’s explanation), is really straight out of the Romantic blue book. Because art, she explains, denies the artist “the realization, the transcendence, he desires,” he must

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move for the “abolition” of the work of art and “ultimately for the abolition of art itself.”25 In short, the work of art is too small a vessel for its creator’s ever-expansive soul. Art must be sacrificed to the wanderer’s infinite longing. He whose true home is the infinite casts off the girdle of form: hence “the abolition of art.” As explanations go, this theory is wanting. To begin with, a work of art “denies” nothing to the artist nor stands against her wishes. When an object supposedly refuses to do something, it is because we are putting it to a task it is not designed for. In truth, we alone are denying ourselves what we appear to be asking for—in this case, transcendence. Which leads to the next contradiction. An art work is an artifact and therefore finite. To start making art but then to seek transcendence by means of it is to change the rules of the game halfway through—like starting a game of chess, then trying to throw darts with knight and rook. Art can of course induce a feeling of transcendence; the mistake is to believe it itself is transcendent. Transcendence (or silence or sublimity) is a circumstantial effect, not a property, of works of art. Ironically, the effort to force this transcendence onto the work of art proper produces an opposite reaction. To reduce an object merely to make it more spiritual or ethereal often makes what remains seem factual. Few things are more loudly material than a minimalist monolith or more artifactually textual than the Mallarmean poem or the Beckettian paragraph. The more we use art to aim at silence, the more ponderously linguistic it becomes. The same can be said of any object with which we try to do something it is not designed for. When we use a hammer to drive in a nail, neither the hammer nor the nail imposes on our attention; both, in this sense, spiritualize themselves. Try, by contrast, to use a hammer as a scarf, and a hammer, thick, dumb, and dull, is what you have on your hands. This is the same with art. Art cannot be silent for the reason that it seeks attention, and it is never in a work of art’s interest to disappear as art. So we must recognize the acts of silence and “self-divestiture” and “renunciation” for what they are: attention-seeking ploys—legends. First of all, it relieves the artist of having to work out his ideas. “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact,” said George Eliot.26 To be sure—and yet: in luck is the man who, saying nothing, puts it over us that he is saying something of great import. “Saying nothing . . . sometimes says the most” (Emily Dickinson).27 Yes, but what does it say? Just because one doesn’t say something doesn’t mean that one has got it right. In fact, we owe silence no automatic respect and must stop assuming that just because an artist goes to inordinate lengths attenuating his expression, that expression would be interesting if he were to give it full flow. Sometimes silence is simply the option of convenience and witlessness. This is one self-serving aspect of the aesthetics of silence. Another is that the legend of silence is in fact designed to make noise. A true act of “self-divestiture” is one you have never heard of; a true aesthetic

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of silence should not want to be noticed. This, of course, is not how it plays on the page, stage, or gallery: like a tot sulking in the corner, self-effacing art makes much of its self-effacement. This is enough to suspect that “aesthetic silence” is really a stylistic strategy to carve a niche in the media-saturated shouting hall of modern society. To any artist after 1950, it is obvious that the easel painting stands no chance against the building-size billboard. Put any modern masterpiece, even a Guernica, on Times Square, and it is a flea in a stampede of mammoths. Advertising can muster in a second the pictorial impact which a painting takes years to build. To survive, high art has to tack against the trade wind: in a society of more, it distinguishes itself by doing less—enormously less. This less becomes a mark of refinement. When gaudery is loosened on the world, chic lies in disciplined simplicity. Bare, phlegmatic and Quakerish a lot of post–Second World War art certainly is. But this renunciation of high color is no artistic abdication. The court jester is still up to his old attention-grabbing tricks—only through other means. A further contradiction in the legend of aesthetic silence is its reliance on critical verbosity. The silencing of art rests on the growing voluminous loudness of aesthetic talk: the slighter the art, the wordier and thicker the exhibition catalogue, essays, reviews, artist statements, and interviews.28 Deflation at the productive end seems to trigger verbal inflation at the receiving: no minimalist object is less than “heroic,” “sublime,” “allencompassing,” “awe-inspiring,” “totemic,” “monumental,” or “archetypal.” Clearly a lot of hyperventilation goes into heightening this silence. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must speak volumes. Agnes Martin, the minimalist painter of white canvases, was sensitive to this contradiction. Consistent with her “interest in experience that is wordless and silent, and the fact that this experience can be expressed in artwork, which is also wordless and silent,” she maintained that the act of silence should also be passed over in silence, and she disapproved of exegetic art history, wall texts, and critical essays in exhibition catalogs.29 To little avail, the refusal of critical literature is a matter for critical literature to discourse on at great length. Martin herself didn’t stand by her own advice: she descanted in copious essays and lectures, proving that silent art not only refutes but abhors its own qualifier. Art is inescapably more—a surplus which I think Martin concedes when she states that “my painting is about impotence” (italics mine). This “about” is the loud kernel of speechifying inside the quiet acorn; it is what the acorn is for.30 *

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One upshot of these aesthetics of silence is, one fears, a lot of defeatism. Beckett’s “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness” cannot be imparted without sullying silence and nothingness. The art of silence thus labors under self-loathing. We can never be silent enough, hence

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never pure enough, hence always sinful in the eyes of the Lord or Nature or Lady Philosophy. I do not dispute the historical pertinence of this feeling in the wake of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and within shouting distance of the Soviet slave colony and Maoist mass starvation. Just the same, even sincere feelings have their use, and the figure of the artist who chides the noisy mob is an enviable one: it is the figure of the saint, of the silent luminary sitting on his desert column. Now, Beckett had enough (black) wit to mock sanctimony (and thereby make it palatable); yet it remains that the preaching of silence rests on a self-serving Romantic legend, which is that the artist takes her orders from a purer moral conscience. It is on account of this superiority that the aesthetics of silence are offered as acts of moral (“heroic,” “brave,” “uncompromising”) protest. It is art on hunger strike, its renunciation and self-emaciation a cry of protest and a call for justice. To a society fallen in evil ways, art signifies its disapproval by going silent. But from where do artists derive this duty to be silent? It must be from the Romantic legend which bestows on the artist superior moral lucidity, a candid and honest heart, a good soul. This legend is what sends him on a hunger strike now and leads him to take up where the sermonizers of old left off: to impugn, scold, redress social ills—to “speak out.” To our ancestors, Luther and Rasputin; to us, Dostoyevsky and Ai Weiwei. Enter the figure of the artist as the voice of conscience and justice in troublous time, the artist who denounces the mighty and “subverts” the powers-that-be. This is the cue to our next chapter.

11 The Legend of Subversion

By artistic subversion I mean two related ideas. One is the notion that art and artists are endowed with a moral understanding that sets them apart from society and gives them a vantage point to denounce and redress the way in which men and women manage their own lives. The other is that, being inveterately subversive, art must at some point controvert itself, undermine its own conditions, and produce anti-art. The first meaning, according to which serious art is by nature contrarian, a conscience-objector and a gadfly, is probably built into the exercise of public expression. When one speaks one’s mind publicly, as an artist does, one is bound to contradict other ideas publicly and thereby earn to the name of mischief-maker. The idea that artists stand apart also derives from the religious, divinatory antecedents of artistic expression. To the ancients, the artist was a holy fool; among medievals, he was a man of God; during the Renaissance, a messenger of Platonic truth. Even after charismatic and mystic thought receded before rationality, but art retained a glow of moral authority. The Romantics lifted the artist to the rostrum of social and spiritual seer; to the generation of 1848, he was a bohemian martyr; after 1920, he was a revolutionary (e.g., André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society”).1 Thus from Coleridge, Hugo, Ruskin, William Morris, all the way to the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, it is understood that artists have such wisdom as enables them to counsel humanity on how to conduct its affairs, contradicting its acquired wisdom and confounding its errors. They are the gadfly stinging the sluggish horse of humankind—a role Plato reserved for the philosopher but now more squarely in the hands of artists. Since the 1800s this flawed humanity tends to concentrate in a specific segment of the population, which is the middle class—“the god-damn bourgeoisie,” to quote D. H. Lawrence. It was they who ran the “dark Satanic mills” of industry in the nineteenth century (Blake); “of all the types of men shaped by society, the least liable to arouse regard” (according to nineteenth-

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century historian Hippolyte Taine);2 “the yelping, carnivorous crowd mad for money and lust” (according to Ruskin);3 “a deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to Hell is equivalent to not making money” (to hear Carlyle).4 The middle class is the extraordinarily culpable social group that the modern intelligentsia is born to chastise and subvert. “In the nineteenth century, ‘bourgeois’ became the most pejorative term of all, particularly in the mouth of socialists and artists,” the historian Johan Huizinga observed in 1935.5 The French Revolution did not kill the nobility’s scorn for the trading class; it found a new lease of life among the lettered and the university-educated who, from Blake and Gautier to Courbet, Dickens, Flaubert, Ruskin, Ibsen, Marinetti, Picasso, Heidegger, Sartre, up to Parisian Maoists and Frankfurter Marxists, see in the bourgeois the least comely of the specimens concocted by history: petty, crass, selfish, calculating, cowardly, exploitative, and oppressive. “How beastly the bourgeois is” goes the title of a poem of 1927 by D. H. Lawrence. This harkens to the “axiom” set by Flaubert some sixty years earlier: “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue.”6 Every artistic generation has more or less cottoned on to that virtue ever since. As to why artists (who are by and large children of bourgeois families, and bourgeoisely retail their talent for financial security) should want to subvert their own world, the reasons are multiple: a Romantic sense of superior judgment and outsidership, a leftover of the religious aura of Western art (which had to do with transcendence, with a sanctified and mystified realm of existence for much of its history), fear and resentment of the customer (and the bourgeoisie is modern art’s undisputed patron). Like it or not, art in modern society is rooted in “the cash nexus”—the term coined by Carlyle to describe the new industrial, banking, commercial economy that takes precedence circa 1800. This new society is governed by what the aristocracy used to describe as the lower virtues: prudence, economy, utility, and diligence—practical attitudes that are offensive to the noble-minded intellectual elite whose view, summarized by Théophile Gautier, is that “everything that is useful is ugly.” The bourgeois being a creature of utility, it follows that he and his world are ugly and that art, being beautiful, is its sworn enemy and our savior—given into us so we may redeem and escape the ambient ugliness and humiliate its chief perpetrator. Wherefrom it is broadly understood that, being natural opposites, art is candid, and the bourgeois devious; that art is generous, and the bourgeois tight-fisted (Ruskin); that art is fierce, and the bourgeois timid (Nietzsche); that art is freedom, and the bourgeois oppression (Ibsen). It is no use arguing against this antipodal scheme—it blinds and binds, like faith. The historian Peter Gay calls it the “Modernist myth that has continued to shape our perception [“self-serving and partisan,” he adds] of the Victorian middle classes.”7 Picasso knew that his patrons, champions, customers, and friends were bourgeois born and bred, yet remained adamant that his entire

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oeuvre was an assault on the bourgeoisie (he used more colorful language involving a finger and fundament) and that he “always struggled like a genuine revolutionary by means of [his] painting” (a revolutionary with a hôtel particulier in Paris and a chateau in Provence), and that painting was an “instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.”8 In some way, Picasso and many like him were not wrong to think they were revolutionaries. It is just that their revolution did not topple the enemy they professed to hate. Instead it played and plays to the drumbeat of the continual revolution which the bourgeoisie began in the eighteenth century, and which it has waged on economic and social and cultural tradition and which, in its unrelenting drive to innovation and reform, it wages on itself too. Art, to put it plainly, attends to its customers. It fulfills the basically conservative social function of relaying the values and truths of those that make, patronize, buy and sell art.9 Come 1800 and thereafter, what the artbuying and reading public wanted to hear about itself is that it subverts the old ways. It wanted an epic of change and creative destruction and anti-traditionalism and contrarianism to celebrate its way of life, and this is precisely what art served and has been serving ever since. There is no contradiction between Picasso being a revolutionary and his retailing to the bourgeoisie which was always the revolutionary class—this was clear in 1789; but it is no less true, though perhaps less clear, in 1900 and 1950. A truly subversive art in the bourgeois age would idolize tradition and convention; it would silence the voices of internal criticism. But this is not how bourgeois liberal society works. Its lifeblood is progress through creative discord and self-questioning. Hence the revolutionary, destructive, and selfdestructive art of the bourgeois age. Nothing, in the sense, is more bourgeois than the Dada slogan of 1919, “DADA is the voluntary destruction of the bourgeois world of ideas.”10 In their heart of hearts modern artists and writers must know that the bourgeoisie is their best friend and safeguard against the return of the royal or papal or state commissar. What allows the self-professed anti-bourgeois artist to overlook this is a categorial mistake: that of confusing aesthetic innovation with social revolution. This link might obtain in a society where artists are explicitly ordered to toe a state-approved line from which any deviation challenges the authorities. In a society that is always reinventing itself, however, aesthetic innovation is the pied piper. It is, one might say, the conservative voice. In any case, the correlation between radical aesthetic innovation and political radicalism doesn’t bear out, not in modern times. Manet, Degas, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot were social conservatives who revolutionized artistic forms; Zola, Sinclair Lewis, G. B. Shaw, and Sartre were radicals who wrote in a workaday style. The most radical revolutionaries of the twentieth century (the Soviets, the Nazis, the Maoists) cracked down on Modernist experimentalism, which found a home and a

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market in bourgeois democracies. Purely from the point of view of geography, Modernism correlates more closely with bourgeois progressivism than with undemocratic upheaval. This has not stopped modern artists in the majority to enter the lists on the anti-bourgeois side. What is most amazing about this picture, therefore, is that for two hundred years the bourgeoisie has been essentially patronizing its own disparagement. As Baudelaire saw plainly and without irony, the bourgeois are “the natural friends of the arts.”11 Since the late 1700s art has largely been made by the middle class for the middle class at the behest of middle-class susceptibilities.12 Whether it is Jane Austen or Bertolt Brecht, Berlioz, or Duchamp, the artist is a member of the bourgeoisie who addresses fellow bourgeois. Now given the steady drip of anti-bourgeois vitriol, one has to conclude two things: that the bourgeoisie has a masochistic penchant (it does, in my view); but that this habit of self-flagellation is (so far) not life-threatening. Perhaps even the contrary: it invigorates the disputative bourgeois mentality. So when Thomas Mann said that his entire oeuvre was an effort to purge himself of his middle-classness, it should be asked whether this class purging might be the most middle-class thing about him. For what is the middle class? It is the upstart class par excellence, one that squeezed its way out of the peasant-and-aristocratic stranglehold. This recent birth has left a double streak of assertiveness and insecurity in it. From the nobility the middle class heard that it was pushy, impertinent, and ridiculous, and from the clergy and proletariat that it was greedy and treacherous. This opprobrium has taken a toll: to its secret shame, the middling class will never be as glorious as the nobility nor as authentic as the peasantry. This is the shame, rich with old deposits of Judeo-Christian guilt and self-reproach, which the intelligentsia mines for the bourgeoisie’s delight and amusement. Nothing is quite so delicious as a cherry of guilt on the cake of economic and political comfort (the yearly reenactment of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is all about this delight). What fiery sermons from the pulpit served to the burghers of old Europe, anti-bourgeois art serves to their great-great-great grandchildren, that is, the educated, wellheeled, guilt-prone ex-Christian urbanite consumers of today’s art. Whereas the poor seek comfort from art and religion, the rich expect mild reprimand. Show business caters to the former, and subversive art to the latter. A cultural trait spreads the same way a gene does: by strengthening the survival of its host. If the legend of subversive art were true, then either this art would have destroyed the bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie would have suppressed it. Neither has happened. It follows that subversive art is useful to its host society and that its legend is recited at the behest and for the benefit of stability. Subversive art—“the healthy virus within social strategies of resistance,” according to a recent publication—is really an antibody.13 One way in which it insures the status quo is the vagueness, the spectralness, the abstraction of its battle plans. Here the knight of the legend tilts against

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the “hegemonic order”; there, against “systemic oppression,” or “empire” or “the narrative.” He goes slaying giants no one has ever seen or heard. Art “should be a real means in daily life to go in and transform the power fields of society” (Beuys); artists must make “aesthetic-critical interruptions, infiltrations and appropriations that question the symbolic, psycho-political and economic operations of the city” (tactical media artist Krzysztof Wodiczko). Such talk, rich in ritual “questioning,” “contextualizing,” “problematizing,” and “interrogating,” basically guarantees business as usual. Where does one even begin to pin down “power fields”? Where does the “social order” begin and where does it end? So long as artists sing the tune that “art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only power to free humankind from all repression,” the managerial elite (which staffs the museum trusts and foots the bill) can rest easy and smile on the protest charivaris.14 There is nothing more wonderfully ineffectual than to substitute shadowy “hegemonic narratives” for practical issues (fair elections, schooling, health provisions, labor conditions, wages, effective and transparent government, etc.). In truth radical art is discontent made into entertainment. Its moral scolding serves not reform but the selfcongratulation of its customers. A further use of the legend of subversion is preparedness: it keeps open the stream of self-criticism that irrigates the bourgeoisie, which thereby remains alert and adaptable. There are many ways for social groups to insure their survival: doggedness, total cohesion, intimidation, stiff hierarchy, nomadic pliancy. The bourgeoisie, for one, has seen to its maintenance by running a feedback loop of criticism that brings problems to the fore for discussion. This heads off trouble and allows discussants to diffuse social tensions. Two cheers for democracy, said E. M. Forster: “one, because it admits variety, and two, because it permits criticism.” Art has been the trusty gadfly of criticism that goads and mocks and keeps the bourgeoisie and its political form, democracy, in working order. If at times it seems only to berate the democratic herd (as Nietzsche might say), in reality this insurrection is a metabolizer. The professoriate will sometimes acknowledge this metabolizing function—though mostly in the mode of calumny: it is the notion that the cunning bourgeoisie “appropriates” subversion (protest, radicalism, counter-culture, critical theory, etc.) in order to neutralize it (see Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Jameson). This is one of the legends the avant-garde has been telling about itself—that in its first bloom it was bold and disruptive and genuinely revolutionary, but then was later co-opted by “capitalism.” It is true that the applied arts (design, fashion, cinema, advertising, etc.) plunder cutting-edge artistic movements for ideas (though cutting-edge artistic movements more than repay the compliment). What is not proven is that subversive art has ever had the subversive power which is claimed on its behalf; what is not proven is that the avant-garde is fundamentally alien to the creative-destructive of the entrepreneurial class;

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and what merits consideration is that, in “appropriating” the avant-garde, the trade-and-innovation society simply welcomes one of its own.15 As to the airy hope that abstract, conceptual, so-called difficult art would dismantle capitalist culture (a hope on which the Adorno aestheticians hooked their wagon), it crashed against several facts: one is that, if abstract and conceptual art is indeed difficult to digest, it is comparatively easier to produce than works of painting or sculpture in the representational tradition. The latter require years of apprenticeship, and a single portrait can take months in the making; by contrast, conceptual and abstract art can be as quickly made as the need for it arises. The difference between the enormous output of Picasso or of the bulging eight years of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career and, say, Ingres’s entire oeuvre does not stem from degree of application but from facility of elaboration. And it is one of the facts about abstract or conceptual art that it is always able to meet the demands of gallerists. It is a style of art well-adapted to the fast-and-furious commercial cycle of yearly shows, early career retrospectives, and gallery openings. Warhol made this brazenly clear by exposing the supply-side assembly-line quality of his own basically conceptual art. He could always deliver as many Warhols as the market demanded without depreciating the price. Regarding the other airy hope that abstract, conceptual, difficult art would free the mind from the intellectual stupor supposedly induced by capitalist culture, there is also doubt. How much time does it really take for the eye to consume a Mondrian, a Newman, a Reinhardt, a Warhol, or a conceptual installation? Such work is to the eye what the headline or the punch line is to the magazine reader: a heavily synthetized statement that asks recognition more than cognition, and notice rather than exploration. It asks us, as shop window displays do, to sample and remember it for later identification. How it cultivates deepened, thoughtful acts of attention capable of breaking us from the funfair hubbub of capitalism is, given this, doubtful. As doubtful as the other hope that difficult conceptual art somehow instills “critical” habits of thought. In truth, and as any visit to the contemporary museum plainly shows, conceptual art is an art of the wall-text, of the curator’s statement, of the audio-guide, and of the prolix exhibition catalogue; it is an art that sends the viewer reading the attached musings and explanations of critics, often more confounding than the piece itself, but which at least gives the visitor the impression of dealing with fundamental ideas, however much those ideas do, when it comes down to it, pass explanation. And this reveals the actually non-subversive, hierarchy-preserving thrust of difficult art, that it leads visitors to submit to the guidance of a clerisy. No wonder critics like it; no wonder the public on the whole doesn’t. Further evidence of the social docility of so-called subversive art is that it almost never antagonizes the intelligentsia that sees to its propagation. That social elite is almost always confirmed in its credos and nostrums. Thus business management, entrepreneurs, law enforcement, and rural

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populations are fair game for subversion; labor unions, NGO’s, governmentrun services, the mainstream press, the universities, the publishing industry, art institutes, dealers, and curators are not. In 1971, the artist Hans Haacke was slated to contribute an installation at the Guggenheim Museum, and it touched on the unsavory business associations of members of its board of trustees. It was pulled out of the show a few weeks before the opening: evidently Haacke forgot that unorthodox art is made of certain orthodoxies the art world enforces with a censor’s frown. Art is transgressive in the way that agrees with the views of those who write the checks. An effusive art press has lately greeted the emergence of a new transgressive art scene in Saudi Arabia by local and international artists Ahmed Mater and Stephen Stapleton. That the so-called transgression is commissioned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should dampen the enthusiasm. The courtappointed transgressors, meanwhile, know full well that the Saudi cultural face-lift contains a few nerve ends not to press (criticism of Saudi royals is one, the tenets of Sharia another). Whether in Riyadh or at the Guggenheim, subversion flows in the prescribed ruts. This is a further remark we could have filed under the legend of artistic freedom: while much airing of political views happens in the contemporary art gallery, the chances are nil that an artist will ventilate even right-of-center ideas. Ideologically, art is currently very predictable. It may well be explained that the market (i.e., art patrons) has no interest in conservative ideas, and this will be true enough. Just the same, it would be genuinely subversive if, precisely in the name of transgression, an artist were allowed to startle these patrons and broaden the range of what can be said. Is transgression a liberating force? Not when it becomes an obligatory posture—not when even artists who have no interest in subversion, artists whose instincts are generally conservative, like Andy Warhol, will be declared transgressive simply because it is decreed that art rhymes with transgression. Even though Warhol (whose art was decorative, humorous, commercial, religious and courtly) proclaimed his boredom with the avantgarde pose of subversion, posterity now praises his “subversive strategy” to critique the capitalist establishment.16 Many things can an artist do except subvert the convention that he is subversive. *

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In the days when the intellectual and artistic pulpit railed against the bourgeoisie, that bourgeoisie had committed no graver sin than bustle and ambition. This was deplorable but not damnable. After 1918, Western democracies had blacker sins to their name. They had wrought a horrific world war followed by an economic debacle. The background hum of anti-bourgeois feeling among the intelligentsia rose to a scream of disgust and horror. Disgust, not art, said Tzara in 1924, was the mainspring of

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the avant-garde movement.17 The English painter Paul Nash, a survivor of the trenches, expresses the prevalent emotion: “I am no longer an artist interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.”18 Notice the turn: in the past art addressed evil from a standpoint of self-respecting lucidity and eloquence (e.g., Jacques Callot’s etchings of the Thirty Years’ War or Goya’s pictures of Napoleonic atrocities). But post-First World War, the very idea of making coherent, wellmade forms smacked of collusion with crime. True art was duty-bound to tell the ugly truth in the mangled voice of a mangled world. The rape of beauty and decency had occurred, and such rape is what, for all intents and purposes, avant-gardists, Weimar Expressionists, existentialists, and so on, intended to serve to a hopefully appalled public.19 Then the Second World War happened, and an art of rags and shards, of despair and disgust, followed. Art committed suicide over the criminal body of civilization: witness Giacometti’s jagged skeletons, Paul Celan’s voiceless poetry, the hollow rasps of musique concrète, or Beckett’s experiments in self-starvation.20 In came an “art of elimination,” known for its “renunciation of cultural authority” and martyrly “self-divestiture.”21 Art paid for the sins of humankind, held to its last shred of dignity by quitting the world—and quit it not with a bang but a strangled whimper. “I speak of art turning from it [the feasible] in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able . . . , of going a little further than the weary road,” said Beckett.22 Anything more affirmative felt like playing Mozart within hailing distance of the gas chambers. In the shadow of Auschwitz, said Adorno, no poet should dare sing lest he be thought glib.23 Or, if he does sing, surely it must be to say that his Muse died in Treblinka or the Gulag. To quote Celan, Should Should a man come Should a man come into the world today, with the beard of light of the Patriarchs; he would need only, if he spoke of this time, he would need only stutter and stutter over, over againagain.24 A well-timed silence can have the eloquence of a long address. In the tonguetied poem we make out a crime too heavy for human expression to weigh. Art commits suicide so the truth comes out.

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The feeling is inarguable but the supporting aesthetic is doubtful. Granted, much of traditional art is too prim, too decorous, too idealizing for Auschwitz; but what of the art that offers itself in remedy? For an art it is, which, while it expresses that it cannot express, is something rather nothing. Yes, it avoids the faux pas of setting Buchenwald or the Gulag to iambic pentameters; but no, the resulting rarefaction doesn’t avoid the pitfall of idealism which, in this instance, consists of art-theorizing art. While conventional art is too beautifying, neutralizing, and intellectualizing, the arts of elimination fare no better: they have created an intensely abstract form of art stamped by the birth defects of intellectualism, namely, a scholastic self-consciousness that agonizes over the conditions of possibility of art and results in a meta-art as preciously removed from life as a handsomely arrowed St Sebastian was removed from pain. Moreover, the notion that beautiful art is culpable because it traffics with the enemy (or, as Adorno says, promotes “reconciliation to the wrong life”)—this idea recycles a Romantic cliché. It is the self-serving notion that poets are exalted beings; that, to quote Celan, they speak with tongues of flame and beards of light; and that, in fallen times, these theurgists indict society by immolating their godlike eloquence. Better commit artistic suicide than contribute a line of verse to society-wide iniquity. Of course, artists are free to fall silent whenever they please. But to do so as a way of signifying that their voice is sullied by the foul world and that they are the stuttering apostles of the absence of God—this is grandiosity. A less Romantic age would merely ask that artists stand witness to their times and say what can be said. By all means, let art express despair in times of despair, but die in the name of art piercingly pure and high? This is not possible for at least two reasons. First, because this death is merely symbolic (it turns art into a metaart that mulls over “the death of art” and goes on speaking, if in groans and whispers), and second because, should art’s suicide be successful, a flicker of human goodness would die, and barbarism win. And where barbarism wins, no one cares about the death of art, and its acts of resistance are thoroughly unnoticed. *

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It is said that modern art is daunting and perplexing. There was a time when artists strove to please their public. Now they practice to baffle. In the scramble to subvert mass culture, high art dresses itself in esoteric forms and fashions. Starting with Mallarmé and Yeats, poetry severs its ancestral ties to the amiable canzone, and speaks in riddles that require scholastic patience to unpack. In Cézanne’s late paintings we observe an analytic tendency which, with Cubism and Constructivism, turns pictorial forms into works of syntactic permutations. This appeal to the grammarian mind is subversion too, according to Frankfurt School analysts; it is protest

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against the entertainment industry. It chides our Hollywood-addled sensuous superficiality. Where mass entertainment puts judgment to sleep, Modernist subversion keeps it in caffeinated theorizing alertness. This is who we got artworks like Malevich’s Black Square which are entirely anti-sensual and conceptual, put off the Sunday visitor, and makes us think about the whence and whither and wherefore of art. Woe betide the artist that should be affable and easy on the eye: he would be suspect of “reconciliation,” the Marxist term for aiding the enemy class. Now, whether this intellectualism is subversive or transgressive or antireconciliatory remains to be seen. It certainly does not offend the mental proclivities of the bourgeoisie—the social class that makes a living out of reasoning, speech, and analysis. Perhaps Modernist riddles merely drive a rebarbative wall of snobbery between the benighted (the unwitting victims of mass entertainment) and the bourgeois technocracy. Bertolt Brecht believed that a deconstructive art would free the people from its ideological slumber; shock, de-familiarization, and self-reflectiveness would crack the crust of bourgeois indoctrination. In reality, anti-theater and similar musical or painterly deconstructions have only ever been of interest to the enemy itself, that is, the middle class. It is the bourgeoisie that takes to Beckett’s unreadable novels, or thrills to footnote poetry (e.g., The Wasteland) and encoded prose (e.g., Ulysses), or applauds Webern, or lionizes pictorial schematism. Its sheer difficulty affirms the bourgeoisie’s taste for cognitive effort and arduous learning curves, for decoding and exegesis. If it “subverts” anything, it is sloth (bugbear of bourgeois ethics) and complacency (bugbear of bourgeois economics). As for the anti-sensuous, schematic forms of Modernist art, it is hard to see that they chastise bourgeois “materialism.” First, because they are excessively material themselves, bluntly and emphatically, courtesy of a thickly loaded brush or a dense impenetrable text; and second, because socalled materialism is not, all appearances to the contrary, the defining trait of affluent societies. To be affluent means in fact being in a position to set your sight on something other than the hand-to-mouth, material aspects of existence. For an authentically materialistic existence, picture the life of the peasantry before 1800 (about 90 percent of our recent ancestors) when every minute of the day is spent sparing, economizing, worrying about, and laboring over the physical (lodging and food and heating and clothing) facts of life. Few thoughts about metaphysical quandaries, ideological alignments, the meaning of words, the sense of history, epistemology or the transcendence of thought do spring from the potato field. These concerns are the children of ease. And the more material ease there is, the more our thoughts wander on high and get analytical and conceptual and philosophical, and the less we preoccupy ourselves with material things. Now, the thing about the conceptual mind (i.e., the sort of mind attached to a body that feels reasonably confident it will not starve come next

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winter) is that it is disposed to think twice, to reconsider, to look at things from novel viewpoints. The well-fed mind is, as it were, Rabelaisean and Montaignean: open to intellectual sport and prone to intellectual caution. In other words, the bourgeois mind is subversive; one might say that it is one of its mechanisms (in business, in science, in society, in the matter of who can vote, of who can be free from religious or racial or sexual discrimination, etc.). Subvert all it wants, subversive art has nothing to teach bourgeois society about subversion: that society has been writing the book on that since Machiavelli conceived Il Principe, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Still, the annals of Modernism are full of heroic gestae about its subversive sorties on alleged bourgeois lethargy. In 1927, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi found himself suing the New York Port of Authority for subjecting his “Bird in Space” to an import tariff (works of art are normally exempt from tax duty). It appears the customs officer did not think the thing in question looked much like a work of art. Yet the judge finally ruled in the artist’s favor. Not surprisingly, the anecdote is trotted out as an example of Modernist subversion trouncing philistine conventionalism even if the story really illustrates the opposite—an American Babbitt who is able to stretch his bourgeois imagination to consider that the limits of art are (like those of science, industry, commerce, and human potential) extendable. If this is proof of the bourgeoisie’s “powers of absorption,” then let’s at least agree that the bourgeoisie is a flexible and capacious and variegated thing indeed.25 Alongside this conclusion I submit that avant-gardism was never anti-bourgeois to begin with and that its abstract language was perfectly at home with the literate, contract-reading, and newspaper-browsing middle class. If Schoenberg or Beckett really stood apart from the “damaged pseudo-culture” of the bourgeoisie (Adorno), what are the chances that the selfsame bourgeoisie would have produced and nurtured and feted them? The extremely self-conscious forms of modern art evince the ethos of craft precision and finicky professionalism that is as old as Huguenot clockmaking. From Racine to the nouveau Roman, the exquisitely chiseled and self-aware expressions of art advertise the bourgeoisie’s pride in analytical prowess. *

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To be sure, the destructive onslaught of avant-gardism offends prudence. Yet, if prudence is a bourgeois virtue, so is innovation. In this sense, the avant-garde is a boisterous strain of middle-class experimentalism. It could get very rowdy at times. Dada’s assault of craft and sense, its know-nothing and do-little defiance did offend the work-and-craft ethic. It was shocking indeed what artists got away with at times—ephemerae, gestures, manifestos,

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a lot of prophetic noise amounting to a few odds and ends. From Dada to minimalism and conceptual art, artists dismissed the old obligation to prove themselves by what they make. “To live truly and effectively, the idea of achievement must be given up,” said Agnes Martin.26 This, too, it appears, was subversion. To be unproductive—is it not to thumb one’s nose at the strivers and go-getters? Perhaps. But then we should point out that here the subversion comes from above, from an old prejudice of the anti-meritocratic aristocratic mindset, and not from below. Contempt for work is the view from the castle and the bishop’s palace. It is there the trick of deriving social prestige out of idleness was first patented. Doing nothing, said the conceptualist Francis Alÿs, is part of “the struggle against the pressure of being productive.”27 Very well. But doing nothing (as a cure of affluence through Zen-like penury) is, and has always been, a feature of affluence—a refinement of those who do less to signify that they can afford more. Therein is the secret of minimalism’s appeal in modern design, interior architecture, fashion, and so on. Simplicity is an adornment of comfort, and minimalism is inconceivable apart from the consumer society. In fact, it is a bourgeois society, the first out-and-out bourgeois class in European history who lived in Holland and the Hanseatic towns in the sixteenth century, which made an aesthetic of virtuous abstemiousness. When, during the baroque period, the aristocracy clung to power in a show of gorgeous exuberance, the rising middle class vaunted its virtues through an art and a lifestyle of understatement. “Froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent” (Voltaire). Underachieving minimalism is that middle made into a style. Anti-bourgeois subversion it wasn’t then and isn’t now. *

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If modern art is not subversive in the sense I have explained, could a case be made that it is reactionary—by which I mean that it aims to protect the time-old entitlements of cultural elites? Sociology invariably brings up the cui bono question: Whom does the deed profit? Twentieth-century art pretty much dismissed the rules and the fact of making and assessing art. It allowed itself to do less, then to do almost nothing. It nullified the difference between success and failure. In sum, it made it difficult (or tasteless and philistine) to hold artworks to standards of reasoned discussion and civil accountability. If we should put this transformation in judicial terms, we would say that art gained immunity. The liberty it professed is the anarchic liberty of dictators. There is nothing we can say to impugn the gallery diktats. “Dada doesn’t speak. Dada has no fixed idea. Dada is never right” (Dada Manifesto, 1921). To which we could add, Dada has figured out there is no more foolproof art than the one which trumpets its vacuity. An art that declares itself beyond making and saying and presenting preempts judgment. Thus if avant-garde art is

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anti-bourgeois, it will have to be the sense that it is aristocratically above judgment: a royalty, a feudal beneficiary of exemptions and liberties and indulgences unavailable to the common producer. This is less an assault on art than a rearguard strategy to lift the artist above civil discourse and recreate social impunity. The person and career of Marcel Duchamp set a good example of this. Duchamp was an artist of mediocre visual ability, but he was clever, and he understood that Romanticism had fixed the game definitely in the artist’s favor. Art’s emancipation from its ignoble court jester and decorator past could be complete only when it shook off public accountability. Duchamp reached that goal by declaring his brainchild, the readymade, indefinable: “The curious thing about the readymade is that I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me.”28 The first move is a distraction: it consists of the false assumption that art needs a definition. If we take this bait, we soon find ourselves chasing a metaphysical pie in the sky. Instead of asking whether the readymade rewards attention, we grapple with the false question, “But is it art?” This question is useful to the dissembler because it is a pseudo-question, that is, a question for which the criteria of verification can be revised ad hoc. Art, we are made to accept, is whatever the artist “interrogates” as possibly being art. It is anything (and this means anything) the artist cares to present under the question “But is it art?” Since the answer is never yes or no, confusion and, more usefully, powerlessness ensues. Duchamp shows his cards when he declares his readymades to be “an attempt at showing the futility of trying to define art . . ., a form of denying the possibility of defining art.”29 Leaving aside the swindle (i.e., Duchamp has just smuggled the impossibility of defining art as a definition), we cannot overlook the self-serving aim. In the land where “art can’t be defined anyway,” the artist rules. Anything he cares to present acquires an aesthetic sheen. The only challenge is marketing: it is about who comes first in calling a urinal a “fountain” and putting it in an art gallery. Meanwhile, the public has unsuspectingly signed away the right to a level playing field. Nothing the artist does or does not do misses the bull’s eye once the game is to call into question what the game is, whether it has rules, whether it has an object, whether the question about whether it has an object is an object, and so on. There is no standard to which we, as a public, can appeal to immobilize the goalpost. Any objection is returned to us in the form of a question. “This is not art!” comes back as “What is art?” or “Is art the aim of art?”; “this is ugly/boring/stupid” comes back as “Why can’t art be ugly/boring/stupid?”; “I don’t like it?” comes back as “Must art be liked?”; and so on. The real purpose is that, absent the categories of judgment, we the public are at the mercy of whatever the cultural mandarin condescends to put before us. Whatever this prerogative does to its possessor, it does little to make society more just or liberal or free.

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Naturally, this artistic priesthood writes the creed. “If the artist says it’s art, then it’s art,” said the minimalist Donald Judd, putting the final touch on the avant-garde palace coup that unseated the public (whose boos are by definition philistine) and dethroned the work of art.30 For clearly the “it” in “it’s art” is superfluous. The proposition does not need a predicate. Sometimes to say that one has not seen it fit or desirable to make art will qualify as an artistic “intervention.” Though this option was explored post-avant-garde, it is really an offshoot of Romanticism. Consider Goethe’s arch-Romantic hero Werther. At pains to convey his sublime insights, Werther nevertheless insists that while “I could not draw now, not a single line, yet I have never been a greater painter than in these moments” (italics mine). To rephrase, the less I paint, the more of an artist I am. Absence of art can be proof of artisticness. Now, this private apotheosis would be harmless enough except that it downgrades the artist who maintains the old plebian ways of proving himself by works and not, say, faith alone. The Romantic revolution makes it possible to suggest, for example, that the demonstrably better painters do not necessarily make for the best artists. Remy de Gourmont praised Monet as “perhaps the greatest painter who has ever lived,” then added: “I put the word painter in italics to mark . . . its restriction. Monet should not be compared with the greatest artists.”31 Where it is possible for the greatest painter not to be the greatest artist, it is possible for the greatest artist to not paint or make great art at all. “It is not what an artist does that counts, but what he is,” said Picasso who happily did not practice his own cant.32 Still, the career opportunities therein weren’t lost on others. The notion that art is an activity without qualifying objects formalizes a profitable arrangement between the artist, who has carte blanche to do or not to do, and the gallerist-curator. For all his vaunted autonomy, the artist alone cannot consecrate himself; the anointing gesture is in the hand of the cultural establishment which, round 1880, shifts from art academies and public opinion to the merchant-art collector-curator-government bureaucrat nexus. This cultural establishment is absolutely crucial to the fortunes of works of art—especially now that artistry isn’t a requisite. The less the work of art speaks for itself, the more power accrues to those that speak for it (mostly, dealers, curators, and their outlets, the art journal and contemporary art museum). It is these institutions that decree whether an artwork is “relevant.” The point is that post-art art is not free from art; it is shot through with institutional control. Consider again Duchamp who appeared to think that his readymades sprang out of his alienation from institutional art. “I’m talking about the old masters, the old things. . . . All that disgusted me.”33 For this disgust, Duchamp gives two reasons: mediocrity (e.g., “what remains of an epoch in a museum . . . is probably the expression of the mediocrity of the epoch”) and superannuation (e.g., “after forty or fifty years a picture dies because its freshness disappears”). The first reason is fatuous, and the

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second hysterically faddish. Neither explains why Duchamp did not express his disgust for old paintings by creating new and better art. His remark merely shows him to be someone who can’t think of a work of art apart from its having been painted in the past, that is, outside of its history. It is in fact someone who mistakes art for art history, a person who is locked in the museum mindset. It is therefore no ill turn of events if Duchampian art is absolutely dependent on a stage set for its existence. A Dutch still life stands to elicit aesthetic attention almost anywhere it is placed. Not so a readymade. Outside the liturgical walls of a gallery, it is scrapyard material. That Duchamp always exercised particular care about how and where his non-aesthetic objects were placed in world-famous aesthetic institutions proves the point: post-art art lives in the safe house of historical art. “I consider taste—bad or good—the greatest enemy of art,” Duchamp said.34 His disciples agree: anti-art henceforth makes matters of taste “obsolescent.”35 But the truth is the reverse: anti-art is art only through taste; it is art sustained by an infrastructure of officialdom, critical complicity, and public compliance—in short, by taste. Without aesthetic chatter, Duchamp’s urinal is naught. It is art by decree of the artist-gallerist-critic tribunal, while we on the outside look up, cap in hand, yea-saying with the masters of taste. That this taste is not exemplified in objects of thoughtful and disciplined craft does not mean it is not taste. It merely means that our betters have found new, intellectually trickier ways of impressing their taste. Though considerably loosened on the production end (“if the artist says it’s art, then it’s art”), the new rules of taste are vigilant at the reception end. Aesthetic philosophy in the twentieth century is weighted toward the producer and against the consumer. A typical example is John Dewey’s definition of art as “the expression of the life of the community.”36 No qualification attaches itself to this “expression” (does it include cowpatthrowing?) or to that “life.” On the production end, then, hardly anything (not even cowpats) can fail the art-entrance exam. Things are less much liberal on the consumption end, however: a mysterious entity, the “community,” decides what counts as legitimate expressions. What is this community and how does it speak? Is it a polled majority, a town hall agreement, a concord of minds? Surely few people will recall having cast a vote to decide that Duchamp’s urinal was zeitgeist material. Especially in the superprofessionalized art world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is gallerists, academics, and government art councils that make the decision, not members of the “community” who, when coming upon a urinal in a gallery, know they are being asked to defer to the better judgment of experts. By the time I step into the gallery, that judgment has spoken, hedged around in all sort of immunity clauses. One is that the criteria of aesthetic worth are not readily definable or even expressible; they are spiritual, communal, ambient, zeitgeist-y. Anyone booing and catcalling Duchamp’s readymade or any of its avatars will have to be a pariah from beyond the hearth-glow

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of the “community,” someone untutored in the ways and skills of the tribe, someone the ancient Greeks called an idiotes. Art is thus a matter of mystery more than mastery, of authority rather than creation. It rests on the everyday magic of group-belonging, authorityworship, and fear of exclusion. Art is not really what the artist says is art; art is whatever experts decide to call art. This, I think, is reflected in Arthur Danto’s definition of art as “embodied meaning calling for interpretation.”37 Since all human artifacts are embodied meaning, the deciding factor must be interpretation: art is whatever gets interpreted, that is, what people in the business of interpreting decide is worth interpreting. As such, art is to us what runes or entrails where to diviners of old: a way of sanctifying a social arrangement. It matters not that this sacrament is a coat rack, a urinal, a Citroen car, a cow sliced in half, or the Mona Lisa. What matters is that we bow to the collective power packed therein. It is that to which we, devotees of supposedly emancipated art, bend the knee.

12 The Legend of the End of Art

A large part of modern art is obsessed with art, as we have seen, and obsessions are unhealthy habits. They batten on their objects until often no object or logic is left but the blind obsession. After an art that seeks to transcend art and an art that seeks to redefine art, there comes an art about the definition of art, an art that wonders about art and wonders about its wonderment too. This development too was foreshadowed in Frenhofer’s story. Balzac is of two minds about Frenhofer. On the one hand, he wants us to know that excessive self-knowledge is corrosive. “Too much knowledge, like ignorance, brings you to a negation. . . . Do not follow his example! Work! Painters have no business to think, except brush in hand.” Frenhofer should have heeded his own advice: he has reflected so precisely on the “problems” of art that his art-making has become a huge self-conscious conundrum. He overthinks every move, and his masterpiece is a scramble of frantically correcting drips and dabs. But Balzac is of course a part-time Romantic and as such cannot help admiring Frenhofer’s puzzlement. His life-long reflection, his self-doubt, his agonized querying of the thing called “painting”—Balzac sees in it “Art incarnate, Art with its mysteries, its vehement passion and its dreams.” A “dim formless fog” though it is, his masterpiece is “the limit of our art on earth” drawn by “a very great painter.” Half of Balzac believes Frenhofer’s self-consciousness causes his failure; the other sings to Hegel’s Romantic tune that artistic self-consciousness is the gist of art. Of course, Frenhofer would have done more if he had thought less about art; but if he had thought less about art, he would be by this much a lesser artist. Such self-consciousness is a special feature of the Romantic period, which elevated art to a separate realm of cultural endeavor. Frenhofer’s obsession with the giants of art history typifies every modern artist who volens nolens is a creature of the museum. His bondage to the past is mostly internal: while he has manumitted himself from atelier apprenticeship, he has put himself under the heavier shadow of the mystery called “art,” and its ministries, art history, and the museum. From Delacroix and Manet onward,

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this cumulative knowledge brings a strong art-critical component to art, and artists henceforth evince an anxious theoretical streak. Frenhofer, we are told, “has meditated profoundly on color and the absolute truth of line; but by the way of much research he has come to doubt the very existence of the objects of his search.” A sane person, if they doubt the object of their search, will give up the search. Not Frenhofer: bewitched by the word “art,” he takes his puzzlement for proof that the puzzle of art exists. From his musings over the essential truth of color and line he concludes there is a hidden truth about them. Having concocted the word “Art,” he believes that his work should instantiate its essence. And it is so for a great many of his descendants: to them too art is less the result of what one does than a commanding essence set above art-making. In this survey of artistic legends, we have followed an order of presentation and refutation—showing first the prevalence of a legend, then its illusoriness. In this instance I am moved to put the explanation of its fallacy in preamble. The legend of “What is art?” (and its offspring “But is it art?”) is deceptive. It pretends to raise a heuristic, quasi-scientific point of elucidation but in fact does not seek an answer to its question. Firstly, because this answer would restore a compass and therefore reintroduce guidelines, which is everything the emancipated (read: deregulated) art world is set against; secondly, because the question “What is art?” admits no answer that is independent of asking it. It is not a question in the order of “what is an electron?” or “what is the population of Burundi?” To ask “what is art?” supposes that a common essence inhabits every act of crafted expression. This is a dubious premise. Of course, we need the word “art” in order to talk about art—in order for a book such as this one to be possible. Just the same, it is doubtful that the concept “art” is necessary for a human being to have an aesthetic experience. If we must have a definition, the most minimalistic and flexible one I know of is that art is whatever the people of a certain time and place find it expedient or opportune or meaningful to call art. This operative definition is flexible enough to admit that a society may well select an absolutist, transcendental definition of art if this is suitable and also because it countenances the possibility that a society may do well without a definition of art. Most of all, this definition avoids the distraction of an overly intellectualized philosophy of art. It practically shifts the focus from the object to “we the people.” It contains the reminder “we the people” have not always needed to attach the label “Art” onto expressively wrought objects. That is a fairly recent development. The making of art today labors under the undue pressure of philosophy which dictates that our understanding and enjoyment of works of art will improve if we proceed from a definition of art.1 Such is this influence that an entire branch of Postmodern art hinges on the question “Is this art?” or “What is art anyway?” or other such variant. An object isn’t art unless it is about “Art,” which means, unless the mysterious power of “Art”

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underwrites its existence. The consummate specimen of this art-about-Art is the readymade which (like Conceptual or Minimalist or Earth Art) is not artistic material unless preliminarily defined as such. We should of course wonder why we today (or since the late Renaissance, but most especially since the 1720s) need to call some things “art.” In answer, we must first of all observe that the question “What is art?” is not heuristic or elucidatory. In fact, it never yields a definite answer; rather it is there to create a mystique and a class of mystagogues. The mystique is top-down Platonic theo-cosmogony, that is, the belief that in the beginning was the Word, that the intellect is the source of reality. The holy spirit touches the thing, and lo, the thing comes to life. The art mystagogue (artist or critic or gallerist or auctioneer) says, “This is touched by the spirit of art” and therewith it is art. The world is enchanted anew while we, befuddled, look on at the acts and shibboleths of mysterious intercession. As we’ve seen above and will see again below, the art game is hardly the democratic town hall it professes to be. *

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Now, to the particulars of “What-is-art?” art. Where Frenhofer disastrously stumbled—into the essence of art—his children went marching in. Their cohorts often speak of art as though it were an essence, a mysterious goal somehow independent of art-making. “What is drawing? How does one come to it?” asked Van Gogh.2 Happily (for us), Van Gogh was artisan enough to know that drawing is the act of drawing and that one does not come to it, but it grows out of you through constant work. Nevertheless his question is telling. It foreshadows a generation of artists for whom practice is not art in action but a means to art, a medium on the way to the summum bonum of self-expression. In the brave new world of modernity, art is theorization—intuition, insight, illumination, arcane excogitation. The apprentice gets to it by thought, by pondering the history of art, by reading philosophy. In ancient Greece, Pallas Athena was worshipped as the goddess of wisdom and of the arts and crafts—it being understood that craft was a form of wisdom. Not so the modern Pallas Athena who subordinates craft to philosophic wisdom—the only wisdom possessed by craft being that which wisdom lends it. Sociologically, this intellectualization is integral to a technocratic society (i.e., of rule by knowledge), which favors the theoretical over the practical, and conceptual thought over artisanship. Here comes the artist as a knowledge worker who analyzes the meaning, the problems, the essence of art in manifestos, statements, and disquisitions. Duchamp epitomized this scorn of skill apprenticeship, applied work, practical competence, and formal aptitude. After him, disinterest in the plastic side of art was a viable artistic career, to be played almost exclusively through talk. The result, the avant-garde manifesto and the readymade, pays homage to

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the managerial elite class whose moral and intellectual perspective is synoptic and top-down and disinclined to learn whether an artist paints or sculpts or writes well. Here, as always in history, the artist is rewarded for flattering the psychology of its patrons—here, the technocratic belief that practical problems call for global theoretical intercession. To this social class, a failed Frenhofer is a hundred times more fascinating than a thousand capable, but hopelessly hands-on, painters. This passion for managerial theory comes to a head in conceptual art. What is art? What is a representation? What is the question “what is art?”? Est-ce une pipe, oui ou non? (Is this a pipe, yes or no?) Of such whatquestions conceptual art is made. The value of artists nowadays, said Joseph Kosuth, primus inter pares of Frenhofer’s children, hinges on “how much they question the nature of art.”3 Making art? Our servants will do that for us. The true artist is a metaphysician sitting at the planning and marketing desk, thinking about art, issuing managerial directives and descriptions— things like Kosuth’s Leaning Glass, which is four panels of clear glass etched with the words CLEAR, SQUARE, GLASS, LEANING; or Five Words in Neon Orange which is five words in neon orange; or Four Words in Color, which, couldn’t we guess, is four words in orange, purple, green, and blue; or One and Three Shovels, which is a shovel, a photograph of it, and a framed definition of the word “shovel.” The message is that an object is naught without its description. Platonism and art make peace at last and launch a joint venture. Romantic subjectivism absorbs reality so well that it leaves nothing substantial or physical behind. In Microphone (1963), William Anastasi exhibited a tape recorder playing back a tape that recorded its own operations. Ian Burn photocopied a blank page, then photocopied that photocopy, and then again, a hundred times over, till he had enough pages for a booklet—that is, for a work of art entitled Xerox #1 (1968). Narcissism, abstraction, repetition (hold a mirror to anything, then a mirror to that mirror, and so on and so forth): this is catnip to the technocratic cat. As Van Dyck to Stuart grandees and Gainsborough to the gentry of Essex, so is conceptual art to the managerial class. For all its sociological relevance, however, this overactive selfconsciousness is superfluous. All art is self-conscious insofar as it is the outcome of deliberative making by a creator who (especially after 1500) invests her personality in the work. There is little Van Gogh would have added to his Bedroom in Arles by including a depiction of himself painting it. That self-depiction clots his every brushstroke, as does his awareness that he is painting a picture rather than washing clothes or eating marshmallows. Nor did conceptual art break new ground in realizing that thought can be an artistic material on a par with paint and marble. This realization is called “poetry and literature.” The real question about Conceptual and Postmodern art at large is why it raised thought and self-consciousness to be not only necessary but also sufficient determiners. This development is indicative of

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intellectualism—of thought triumphant. It blinds the conceptualist to the fact that thought is only worth its specific content, what it is of, whether it is true or false, important or trivial. There is no such thing as thought proper—though self-consciousness comes very close to it, which is why it is mostly empty. This emptiness, autonomous and pure, is conceptual art’s Shangri-La—its place of final Platonic-bureaucratic escape from grubby reality. Therein the conceptual art consumer (knowledge worker, symbol analyst, journalist, academic, financial trader, etc.) repairs, confident in the belief that in the beginning is the logos and that the logos is with the board of commissioners. It spells out the final denigration of labor as a source of intelligence and creation, the triumph of the university over the workshop, and from a sociological standpoint, it marks the return of art into the hands of ruling class scornful of the old hit-and-miss, trial-and-error ways of production. The new ruling caste believes in planned organization, and planned art is what it favors. This service, of course, doesn’t condemn conceptual art. But it puts paid to the legend that conceptual art is about art; it is, as it has always been with art, about its customers, hence about a way of life, a way of seeing the world, a social class. The pompous question “What is art?” assumes two things: one, that art boils down to an essence and two, that this essence determines our conduct toward it, a conduct that enjoins public submission to a fait accompli: no longer do we make and use art for purposes that we determine; rather we bow as the essence of art cryptically enshrined in the conceptual piece stipulates we should. This scheme consecrates the principle of top-down technocratic authority. The questions that the people of a liberal democracy should ask are, What do we want from artworks? What should artists do for us? In what way does this or that work merit my (unforced, sincere) consideration? What criteria of value am I made to subscribe to in considering this piece of art, have they been explained to me, and do I agree with them? Just as we do not ask “What is entertainment?” or “What is decoration?” because we clearly see that these objects are ancillary to social utility, so it should be with art. Ask not what it is, but what it does: this is the question that befits a liberal society and a people who see through the mystique of essentialism. The wooly question “What is art?” is of course a boon to those who call themselves artists in preamble, rather than in consequence, of making art. The self-reflexive never have to worry about having to propose anything of interest so long as they make great moment of proposing it. Thus, we pardon the penury of intelligence and stick-figure composition of, for example, One and Three Shovels. In fact, lack of handcraft becomes an asset: it speaks for the artist’s Platonic distinction. Whatever else he did, at least Kosuth kept his hands clean. Schematic purism tells of a neo-aristocratic elite grown estranged from its bourgeois roots in workmanship, technique, and applied know-how. It is aristocratic because, unlike bourgeois craft, it is loath to

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undergo the fruitful cross-examination of facts and ideas: in Conceptual art, the idea is never seriously challenged by form—like the philosophertechnocrat whose schemes are insulated against anything so vulgar as consequences. Conceptual and conceptualized art has no other message: it says that value lies in intention. This is the gist of much modern art since Malevich’s Black Square and Duchamp’s Fountain. *

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Obviously, this blueprint puts art on a starvation diet. In time, it dawns on the Conceptual artist that he has little to be intentional about apart from the idea of his being conceptual. This proves emaciating even to its practitioners. In a 2005 exhibit, the conceptualist John Baldessari offered a giant floor-painted installation making the pledge, “I will not make any more boring art.” A gallant admission, to be sure, though not one that fulfills its pledge. The moral is that it takes more than intention to make something of value. Otherwise the Conceptualist quotes and questions and argues with herself into inconsequence. Hamlet, the prince of conceptualists, worried that his play, being overly pregnant of his thought, lagged and dragged and bored. As his thought threatened to smother the play, he too resolved to stop making boring art: “About, my brain!” he scolds, stirring himself to get beyond words, words, words. Hamlet was lucky because, however immense his egotism, it was still second to the Globe Theatre and its prudent respect for the public. The Romantic artist, on the other hand, recognizes no such imperative, and no context larger than his intention. He, unlike Hamlet, can stop the play and make that stoppage a thing of aesthetic interest. Thus, when the legend of “What is art?” runs dry, the time comes to squeeze a legend out of the fact that art has run dry. The prolix literature on the end of art basically weaves around two propositions: one is that art has outgrown the traditional concept of art; and the second is that art henceforth rejects any more definitions, hence that the concept of art itself has ended.4 The first proposition is true but banal; the second is not banal but untrue. The announcement that art has ended goes back to Romantic idealist philosophy. Hegel believed that artists had become superfluous now that philosophers had thoroughly charted what art was about, where it had been, and why. Anything of aesthetic interest henceforth could be formulated in philosophical propositions. To Hegel, the philosophical critique of a painting was a heartier meal than the painting proper. Art had been a finite phase of civilizational development, and it was now over and done with.5 This grand announcement found few buyers at the time, outside of German philosophy, but it definitely caught the imagination of the avant-garde a century later. To overcome art was the aim of Primitivists, who sought to “forget” art by immersion in psychic and cultural prehistory; it was also the aim of Dada

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and the radical avant-garde which rejected formal standards of aesthetic creation to concentrate on the idea of art (and thus fulfill Hegel’s wish). To transcend art was also the dream of minimalism, an aesthetic sensibility that seemed to apologize on behalf of art for the sin of existing, for the hubris of having once left the bosom of “being” and “presence.” “My making a painting that can’t be seen” said Reinhardt of his black canvases—it is “the last painting anyone can make.”6 If black wasn’t enough there was always the option of nothing—something like John Cage’s silent piano piece or the show organized by Daniel Buren and others in 1965, which consisted of removing pictures from the wall and handing-out of flyers that said, “We are not painters.” We are, thank goodness, (Hegelian) philosophers of art. It all looked and sounded (when it ventured to look or sound at all) quite radical, this act of self-abolishment. Just the same, it suffered a built-in contradiction: it was, and is, social spectacle; it begs to be shown, spoken of, and consumed; and its tenuous products put money in the social-capital purse of its customers. As the hermit who sat on a bare column to shame Roman glut, the urban sophisticate buys into post-art, or minimal art, or wordart to look Zen and shame Walmart. Self-effacing art advertises the moral discernment of an elite who, in a world of material plenty, distinguishes itself by having and displaying less. This social utility is of course no argument against the art of the-end-of-art; in fact, it is how things should be. But it does draw our attention to the inconsistency of the artistic disappearing act. This inconsistency, in a nutshell, consists of making aesthetic heavy weather of overcoming art. So long as not-making art or supplanting art is deemed of artistic interest, so long as we are supposed to lend an aesthetic ear to performed silence and an aesthetic eye to the absence of paintings, then art has not ended. Quite the contrary, in fact: it becomes immortal. *

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To explain my meaning, we turn again to Marcel Duchamp, master of the dwindling act. No sooner had the readymades shot to prominence than Duchamp disappeared from the scene. Having stopped creating objects, then called this stoppage a form of art, then focused on the word “art,” then called into question the possibility of attaching any meaning to that word, there was no other trick of subtraction to perform apart from dropping out altogether. Which, for all intents and purposes, is what Duchamp did from 1918 until roughly 1948, at which time he was seen again talking and lecturing in artistic circles, and even went so far as producing one installation (he died in 1968). The point is that, for most of his life, Duchamp did not make art, and was not, in any conventional sense, an artist. But this conventional sense is moot in the era of the end-of-art. In the annals of Hegelian modernity, it is self-evident that in the thirty-some years Duchamp did not make art, and the remaining twenty during which his involvement

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was mostly consultative, Duchamp was, and remained, essentially and truly an artist. His absence from the art circuit crowned the revolution begun with the readymades; it was the avant-gardist tabula rasa turned into a brave and brilliant performance; it was a post-art work of art. Now, the fact that this post-art was, and is, of interest to art tells us everything we need to know about its fallacy. The end of art is a legend— doubly fantastical for assuming a state of affairs altogether contrary to the one that is advertised in the legend. To put it bluntly, it declares art outmoded so that the artist goes on existing unchallenged in gloria et perpetuum. It is useless to bemoan the mediocrity of anti-art. The proponents of the legend of the end of art gleefully concede as much: art is dead; no one believes in art; art is not special. Yet notice that something strange happens: as the work of art slims down to the dry bone (a slab, a cement haiku, a blank), then almost nothing (an empty room, an intention, withdrawn invisible paintings, silence, etc.), and finally absentia (thirty years of non-activity), the artist’s credit stays as high as ever. Jacques Vaché, an instigator of Surrealism, made this interesting remark to André Breton in 1917: “ART does not exist so it is useless to talk about it. Still, people go on being artists because it’s like that and no way else.”7 No, the non-existence of art did not send artists back to calling themselves craftsmen and showmen (“buffoons of the human race,” as Montesquieu said). Contrariwise, it seems the non-existence of art was declared so that the artist prevails come hell or high water. In truth, the end-of-art is the moment when artists finally ascend the throne of world-legislators envisioned by Shelley. They define and are not defined. Indeed, they have so thoroughly assimilated art to their own person that if it is their persona not to make art, or if it is in their persona to call off the history of art, they are not the less (and perhaps the more) artists for that. An image comes to mind, that of the artist as god-emperor whose very indolence, unconcern, and imperturbability prove his sovereignty. Not without reason the age of the so-called end-of-art meshes with a style of art that is as peremptory, domineering, and prosecutorial in the inverse proportion to which pre-Romantic art had been cordial and amenable. It is an artist convinced of his sacrosanct authority who goes on calling himself an artist precisely because he has nothing to show for it. Post-art is an art that nothing can challenge, no comment can hurt, and no counter-proof can touch. The perk of being a ghost, after all, is that nothing can kill you. In this shadow play of ghosts, it is inevitable a work of art comes along to make post-art of other artists’ not making art, a work such as Joseph Beuys’s The Silence of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated (1964). Its title notwithstanding, this work is not a serious challenge to art in the era of Duchamp. Beuys knows that the end-of-art means that there are no criteria by which to overrate or underrate anything, hence no gauge to evaluate whether Duchamp’s not producing stuff is more or less artistically significant than producing it. Beuys’s piece, which consists of its title in graffiti lettering,

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is squarely within the canon of post-achievement. It is another whirl down the rabbit hole of subtraction, which says that the discussion of art’s absence is yet too redolent of art, that it is, in this sense, impregnated with the mentality of artistic rating. Something that holds its own absence to be significant, is it not something still clinging to a shadow of worth, of better and worse? Nihilism strictly conceived must not value itself, or advance or defend its own positions. So it should be of the end of art which, to be consistent, ought not to make a peep of its fate. This of course is not a salto mortale that end-of-art art is willing to make. Our age is so steeped in “the ideology of the aesthetic” that it is probably not within the power of art to end anyway. Consider that if Beuys had imparted that the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated by not commenting on it, this would have been no guarantee against his lack of comment being construed as a work of art. The truth of the end-of-art is that it ushers us into the era of art infinite. Fruitlessly did Beuys tender his resignation in white offset on a black card: Hiermit trete ich aus der Kunst (I hereby resign from art) promptly became Hiermit trete ich aus der Kunst (1985)— an artwork. I hereby resign from art and thereby sign up for it again. This is Oscar Wilde’s dream of the life aesthetic come true: even the attempt to quit art is sucked back into art. At this point we may well infer that art simply means the intellectualization of everything. *

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What I take to be the illiberal complexion of the cult of art (lately masquerading as the end-of-art) runs contrary to the seeming latitude of post-Modernism, that is, the liberalizing elimination of entry terms and conditions of making art. Post-Modernism indeed has an air of democratic welcome: it rejects distinctions of high and low, proper and improper, serious and trivial. Such is the emancipation of art, its de-definition, that Postmodern artists, as Danto says, “were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all.”8 Danto likens this complete liberalization with the advent of a class-less, egalitarian, free society. One is allowed to ask whether it is so in practice and whether the paths of artistic consecration have become more open, and the voice of contemporary art more independent of formal institutions. It is at the very least doubtful. In matters of taste, unregulated Postmodern art (nonart, post-art, anti-art, etc.) has become more, rather than less, dependent on metaphysical academism. What is art? When is art? What is art for? These questions are the stuff of academic conferences, and their exhibition glamorizes an esoteric conversation between specialists. Such art wants our consideration, if not our affection, and receives it. We the public have come to accept objects of extraordinarily underwhelming quality, indeed even the delivery of nothing (an invisible or removed painting) as things pregnant

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with ultimate meaning. It is hardly for the museum visitor to approve of these esoteric demonstrations. The time is long past when back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a genuinely participatory public made its voice heard before reputations were made. The path to consecration is no longer a public course: it runs in the ever-shortened pneumatic tube between art school and museum. The rules of art-making may have gone by the board but the rules of an artistic career are as professionalized as ever. An artist without an art-school resume is worse off than an artist who makes nothing. A recent quantitative study by social scientists shows that, far from a wordof-mouth rags-to-riches story, artistic renown is decided very early on by the patronage of a few international galleries, like the Gagosian Gallery, Leo Castelli, and Paula Cooper in New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and London, Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin, and Galerie Kinsinger in Vienna.9 Only this handful of career-making gatekeepers confers lasting relevance, and only one in ten artists has any chance of making a mark who did not start out from the initial lucky anointment. The point is that the artistic game is not played from the grass roots or the barricades. Just because aesthetic control hangs in twilight does not mean that professional elites have released their grip over the institutional control of art, far from it. As to why art historians and intellectuals generally embrace deregulated end-of-art art, the reason is not just Hegelian fatalism (whatever exists at any given historical period is what this historical period demands and which therefore has to be) nor snobbery (the fear of turning out to be the critic who mocks the next Van Gogh) nor convention (crying out that the emperor wears no clothes exacts a professional cost). The main reason is class taste. The theoretical, philosophical art of post-Modernity flatters the mentality of critics, scholars, and journalists. An art form which says that theorization is as principal and dignified as art-making is a paean to people who interpret for a living. It also gives them work and justifies their place in society: a work of art that says extremely little leaves that much more for the critic to expound and expand. A critic who celebrates an artist for making “an art no longer visible” which says that “he has nothing to show us, paintings that make us blind, unable to see them”—this is a critic putting money in his purse.10 Whereas such invisible art would have put the old-time critic out of business (if there is nothing there, there is nothing to say), in a knowledge society, it is the reverse. In point of fact, the age of non-art and post-art and dubious art has seen an explosion of critical verbosity. As art objects shrink in eloquence and galleries grow more blank and bare, exhibition catalogs and wall texts lengthen and thicken. This is no accident. The less there is for the public to behold, the more there is for the priest to explain, and a priest will always be grateful for a circumspect god. Of course, it was to be expected that where art went (into Delphic mystery), criticism would follow. Enter criticism as mystic incantation: “That which we call thought must be disarmed. . . . Here and now it happens that there is

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this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime,” says a cantor of post-Modernism.11 That there is this painting, rather than nothing, that’s sublime: the sublimity in question (on which minimalism stakes claim) is that of sheer being, the cosmic “I am that I am” that passes all explanation and enjoins silence. The art philosopher isn’t shy to claim this sacred silence for his own practice: for that which we call thought must be disarmed, and we must “let go of all grasping intelligence and all its power, disarming it.” The trick is that this disarming spares the thought that expresses it. What the message comes down to is therefore this: any discourse in disagreement with post-art sublimity is incoherent. Once again, all liberties are granted at the production end (the mere existence of a painting, never mind its appearance, is miraculous if the ecclesiastic says so); none are allowed at the reception end. Of course, the Postmodern mind is welcome to its own sublimities. Such, after all, is the carnival function of art that it momentarily absolves us from the burden of explaining ourselves. My objection is twofold: one, it contradicts the declared aim of post-Modernism, which was supposedly demotic and demystifying. Away with transcendental Romantic posturings, Postmodern art has been saying. Yet an art which does not bear defining, isn’t that an ineffable object, and therefore a return of artistic transcendence? The second objection follows on the first: an ineffable artistic object transcends criticism and furbishes a social mystique, removes art from the public square, and places it on an altar. It is anti-liberal. “The function of criticism should be to show how it [the artwork] is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means,” wrote Susan Sontag.12 Such rhetoric claims the authoritarian-mystical “I-am-that-I-am” of divine being for philosophical discourse. Of course, there is some consolation in the fact that philosophy resists being drawn into this mystification: as a matter of fact, Sontag’s call for gnomic-mystical criticism is itself not gnomic and mystical but expository. Of it we can ask whether it makes sense. This is ground to hope that because it renders accounts, criticism remains antiauthoritarian, there to take us down a peg or two when we give ourselves airs of secret authority. *

*

*

Minimalism, Conceptual art, “What-is-art?” art, the wantonly bad art of Dada, the junk art of Pop Art, the art that gleefully proclaims its worthlessness or its disappearance—it is the art of a supremely confident elite and, pari passu, the art of a supremely confident society. Only a society in a ruling frame of mind can afford to publicly question its right to exist, starting with the right to recommend itself to its members. Art today is often denigration and conscience objection; it is the fool that makes wisecracks at the coronation; it is the jester who commits mock-suicide to indict his king. Still, the king notably retains his fool and reserves a seat for him at

THE LEGEND OF THE END OF ART

213

the high table. Depending on circumstances, we would say that it is either a very confident or very foolish king who encourages jabs on his own person. Perhaps he thinks that he has nothing to fear; or perhaps he is bored with ruling. End-of-art art (and its myriad expressions) gives the impression of a civilization that has lost the will to live. And to be sure, this feeling has alarmed, or cheered, commentators ever since the battlefields of the Great War. But of all sentiments, self-loathing is possibly the least sincere: it takes deep reserves of self-love to sustain a long-range onslaught of self-doubt. As a social phenomenon, anti-art denotes a culture so complacent as to believe itself beyond the need of recommendation. If the philosopher Stanley Cavell is correct that modern art dangles the possibility that it may not be art after all, the dangling itself suggests a civilization grown so selfconfident as to think it can call itself a fake before the global community and expect to earn its consideration.13 Only such a civilization can entertain such pronouncements as “the uncreative artist is greater than the creative one: the latter merely creates; the former has the power to create and the power to not act on it.”14 Non-art, post-art, junk art, anti-art art: these are the offspring of plenty and hubris, the children of a society that believes it has surpassed the need to affirm itself. A civilization more alive to the fragility inherent in all human works would be less complacent with merely “interesting” art, non-art, random art, or the Marie-Antoinettism of an artistic culture which says, from the mouth of a major art institute director, “I’ve always had this dream of making a museum that kids drag their parents to.”15 No doubt, such language is dictated by the pendulum of fashion: after the beetle-browed exercises of 1970s conceptual and installation art the roaring 1990s were ready for a return of artistic jocularity (last seen in airy, coloring-book Pop Art back in the 1960s). It was a time when an artist like Damien Hirst could say of his own wares that they are “perfectly dumb paintings which feel absolutely right.”16 He was right that they felt, and still feel, absolutely right—at any rate to its patrons. Of course, art keeps a finger on the pulse of history, and there are signs, coming after 2001, then 2008, that hypochondriac seriousness is once again back in fashion. One thing, however, seems to endure through the metronome swings between ironic insouciance and glum earnestness. It is a higher-level insouciance about art itself—how well it is made; how demanding of itself it is; how much it cares to earn the respect of even the people who are not interested in art; and how much it believes it embodies the best, the most thoroughly decanted and well-conceived expression of a society at any given time. This book has been about how art became modern, and what modern art is. Its outlook is that of the historian who does not bemoan the trajectory taken by societies but explains, inasmuch as this can be done, the causes and uses of ideas and institutions. Of course, a historian is naturally curious to know how his own civilization will look in the eyes of future historians. A

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thought that arises from the spectacle of contemporary art might be that our age had a lot of money to throw at art, so much indeed that artists could meet the demand only by lowering and then annulling their standards. Another conclusion is that our age was both exceptionally cynical and gullible—both foibles of the affluent. But perhaps a future moralist will worry about a society that cheered as art devalued itself—or valued itself for the prices it fetched, or the prizes it garnered, or the morals and politics it promulgated, and too little by how much it embodied and communicated the love of making and doing one’s best—the word for which is art, that is, the cultivation of techne. Let’s return to the example of Pallas Athena who was worshipped both as the goddess of wisdom and the patroness of craft. This tells us that craft and formal excellence are no less marks of intelligence than a theorem. In the historical scale, the love of making and doing one’s best is nothing but civilization, and art is civilization’s way of expressing self-love. We neglect this self-respect at our own risk. A society that believes itself above the need to cultivate self-love just may find itself defenseless against the Furies. After the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale cries out that the emperor wears no clothes, the emperor continues his procession through the town. It is not said how long.

CODA

This might have been the note on which to end this book. But it leaves the reader on the unwanted note that our recent artistic past may have been on the whole more decadence than advance. I think there is simply too much art in the last hundred years, made by so many hands famous or still obscure, that it is impossible the period does not contain works of supreme excellence. It will take a couple of centuries to excavate the bric-a-brac, and works of true worth will no doubt rise to view. This expectation will jar against ears that are used to hear that there is no better and worse in cultural achievement. Happily, such relativism only brushes past the ear and does not impress reason. To live as a thinking organism, whether individual or collective, is to choose this or that path and to set investment and hope in the chosen direction. We value what we do, if only because we spend ourselves in its pursuit. To this law, modernity is not immune, and the zeal with which the modern mind enshrines its achievements, and creates museums and institutes and textbooks for them, is proof that it always believed in its own worth, and that it offered itself to the judgment of future generations in hope of, at the very least, a commendable mention. I find much to approve of in this hope. It admits that, tried as it might, modernity never jettisoned the idea of quality, which, as I have just argued, is but the level-headed and practical basis of tradition. Tradition does not mean returning or clinging to the old ways—even the arch-traditionalist Burke knew the futility of it. Tradition is simply a record of quality; it is first of all the charitable assumption that the past isn’t merely a den of knaves and scoundrels; that it is a depository of things that have gone splendidly right in culture, which means necessarily, a record of what has gone quite wrong. It is a landscape of summits and lowlands. Of course, summits stand out thanks to lowlands, but this is not an advantage that we, who live in the valley, should begrudge them. They give us something to admire, and the love of summits is one form of love that no civilization can do without. The gist of these final remarks is this: that if indeed modernity never dropped the principle of quality; that if it always was serious about art and tradition and civilization even when it seemed to turn on them, then perhaps the time has come to accept the invitation of tradition and demand the very best of ourselves.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” accessed February 12, 2018. http:// www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html 2 Among many studies, Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Eugene Goodheart, The Cult of the Ego: The Self in Modern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2017); Peter Selz and Hershel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); C. Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009). 3 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, ed. Louis Menand (New York: Viking, 1950), 287. 4 Paul Gauguin, The Writings of Savage (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 129–30. 5 Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 34. 6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 98. 7 Albert Camus, Carnets 1942–1951 (London: H. Hamilton, 1963), 152. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 37. 9 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: The University of Oxford Press, 1973), 85. 10 See Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 305.

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Chapter 1 1 In William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Vol. 2 of A New Varorium Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2000), 143. 2 Ibid., 166. 3 Ibid., 393. 4 Ibid., 157. 5 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood (Mineola: Dover, 1998), 57. 6 In Kenneth Clark, The Artist Grows Old (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 24. 7 This and all other references to Hamlet from Harold Jenkins, ed., The Arden Editions of the Works of William Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co., 1982). 8 Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 57. 9 Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2012), 90. 10 J. W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. William Allan Neilson (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1917). See especially Book IV, Chapter XIII. 11 Richard Lanham, “Superposed Plays,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 88. See also Lanham’s The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Row, 1962). 12 Peter Alexander, Hamlet: Father and Son (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955); Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 408. 13 Furness, 146. 14 John Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2010). 15 Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 144. 16 Ibid., 421. 17 G. W. F. Hegel, “Dramatic Poetry from Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts,” in Philosophers on Shakespeare, ed. Paul Kottman (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2009), 70. 18 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 322. 19 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper, 2005), 285.

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20 Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (New Have: Yale University Press, 1986), 97. 21 William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (Whitefield: Kessinger Publishing, 2005), 231.

Chapter 2 1 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. Vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1996), 754. 2 Ibid., 747. 3 Michelangelo, Letters of Michelangelo, trans. E. H. Ramsden. Vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), Liii. 4 Augustine, De Trinitate, III. The Internet Archive, last modified February 9, 2018, 9. https://archive.org/details/AugustinesDeTrinitate 5 Vasari, II, 709. 6 Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 17. 7 Ibid., 79; 24. 8 Bram Kempers, Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in Renaissance Italy (New York: Penguin, 1987), esp. 142–64. 9 Robert Goldwater, ed., Artists on Art: From XIV to the XX Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 22. 10 Leonardo Da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, ed. Jean Paul Richter. Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970), 660. 11 In John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti: Based on Studies in the Archives of the Buonarroti Family at Florence. 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 110. 12 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (New York: University of Oxford Press, 2008), 478. 13 Francisco de Holanda, “Three Dialogues,” trans. Charles Holroyd and A. J. Clift, in Michael Angelo Buonaroti (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 306. 14 Vasari (1996), 676. 15 Michelangelo, Poems and Letters: Selections, with the 1550 Vasari Life, trans. Anthony Mortimer (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), 61. 16 Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art, 387. 17 Michelangelo (2007), 57. 18 Ibid., 56. 19 Auguste Rodin, L’Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell (Paris: Grasset, 1911), 266.

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20 Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo, A Self-Portrait: Texts and Sources (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 80. 21 Ibid., 21. 22 Ascanio Condivi, “Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti,” in Michelangelo, Life, Letters, and Poetry, trans. George Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 38. 23 Benjamin Blech and Rob Doliner, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 293. 24 Clements (1961), 414. 25 See Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 114–15. 26 Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2014), 105–07. 27 Ross King, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 265. 28 Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 59–61. See also Anthony Hughes, Michelangelo (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), 74. 29 Michelangelo (1963), 31. 30 Condivi, 37. 31 Michelangelo (1963), 48. 32 Ibid., 54. 33 See Michelangelo (2007), 3–4. 34 See Vasari (2008). 35 Michelangelo quoted in Condivi (1987), 305. 36 Michelangelo (1963), 75. 37 Ibid., quoted in Condivi (1987), 89. 38 Unger (2014), 153. 39 Julian Klaczko, Rome and the Renaissance: The Pontificate of Julius II (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 354. 40 Augustine, The City of God, trans. D. D. Marcus Dods (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009), see Book XI. 41 Michelangelo, Rime e Lettere (Torino: UTET, 1992), 370. 42 Michelangelo (1963), 71. 43 Goldwater, 327. 44 Clements (1961), 388. 45 Condivi, 38. 46 See Vasari (1996). 47 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, accessed February 12, 2018, see Book 37. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plin.%20Nat.%2037&lang= original

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48 Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Classics, 2005); see §61. 49 See Vasari (1996), on “Donatello.” 50 Ibid., 68. 51 Ibid., 472. 52 Ibid., 297. 53 See Andrea Bayer, “Renaissance Views of the Unfinished,” in Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, eds. Kelly Baum et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 21. 54 See Vasari (1996). 55 See Clark (1972). 56 See Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 57 François duc de La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres de François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Paris: Hachette, 1868), 263. 58 Joshua Reynolds, The Works of Joshua Reynolds (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand, 1809), 286. 59 Eugène Delacroix, Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Lucy Norton (London: Phaidon, 1995), 183. 60 Théophile Thoré, Salons de W. Burger Salons de W. Bürger, 1861 à 1868: Thoré, T. (Théophile), 1807-1869, 49. Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive. n.d. Internet Archive, accessed February 12, 2018. https://archive.org/ details/salonsdewburger1800thor 61 Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans, ed. Ronald de Leeuw (New York: Penguin, 1996), 405. 62 James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait (New York: FSG, 1965), 10–11. 63 Vasari (1996), 104. 64 Ibid., 100. 65 In Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 346. 66 See Vasari (1996), on “Michelangelo.” 67 Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art, 364. 68 Michelangelo, The Sonnets of Michel Angelo Buonarroti, trans. John Addington Symonds. 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1904), 103. 69 Condivi, 87. 70 Clements (1961), 174, 175, 179. 71 Ibid., 179. 72 Michelangelo, Poems and Letters, 62. 73 Ibid., 178. 74 See Vasari (1996).

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75 In James L. Hutson, Early Modern Art Theory, 1400–1700 (Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing, 2016), 100. 76 See Nicholas Penny, “Two Paintings by Titian,” in Tiziano: técnicas y restauraciones, ed. Fernando Villarverde (Madrid: Prado Museum, 1999), 132–66. 77 See Vasari (1996), on “Tintoretto.” 78 Ibid., on “Titian.” 79 Federico Zuccari, Scritti d’arte de Federico Zuccari (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1961), 250. 80 Giordano Bruno, “Eroici furoi,” in Opere italiane, ed. Paolo de Lagarde (Göttingen, 1888), 625. 81 Vasari (1996), 359. 82 Michelangelo, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, trans. James Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 84. 83 Ibid., 419. 84 In Goldwater, 102.

Chapter 3 1 Ilan Stavans, Quixote: The Novel and the World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 10. 2 José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 162. 3 Trilling, 209; Harry Levin, “The Example of Cervantes,” in Cervantes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lowry Nelson (New York: Prentice Hall, 1969), 34. 4 Daniel Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (New York: Random House, 1992), 306. 5 Carlos Fuentes, “In Praise of the Novel,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 613. 6 In Edwin Williamson, “Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote: Romance and Picaresque,” in The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, ed. Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17. 7 See Cesáreo Bandera, The Humble Story of Don Quixote: Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), esp. 86–113; Anthony Cascardi, “Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel,” in Cervantes, ed. Anthony Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58–79; and Caroll B. Johnson, Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1990). 8 See Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Mineola: Courier Corporation, 1999). 9 See Manuel Fernández Álvarez, Cervantes visto por un historiador (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2005).

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10 See Henry Kamen, Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2014). 11 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 415. 12 See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983). 13 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 16. 14 Michel de Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” in Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1993), 231. 15 See William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), as well as Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013). 16 See William Egginton, The Theatre of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 17 William Egginton, The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 158. 18 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971). 19 Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (Orlando: Harcourt, 1981), 210. 20 In Alwynne Mackie, Art/Talk: Theory and Practice in Abstract Expressionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 87. 21 Pierre Corneille, L’Examen de L’Illusion Comique. Théâtre De P. Corneille. Partie 1 / Reveu et Corrigé par L’autheur. n.d. Gallica, accessed February 12, 2018. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k71442p/f48 22 In Jorge Luis Borges, “La supersticiosa ética del lector,” in Discusión, accessed February 12, 2018. http://www.literatura.us/borges/dellector.html 23 In John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel (London: King’s Crown Press, 1943), 13. 24 On this novel’s melancholy exhaustion, see Pedro Cerezo Galán, El Quijote y la aventura de la libertad (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2016), 316–24; 483–04. 25 Salvador de Madariaga, Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), 51ff. 26 See Stephen Gilman, The Novel According to Cervantes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 137 et passim. 27 See Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, ed. Donald Yates and James Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 36–44. 28 See Slav N. Gratchez and Howard Mancing, Don Quixote: The Reaccentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 29 See Didier Maleuvre, The Art of Civilization: A Bourgeois History (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 47–53.

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Chapter 4 1 In H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 510. 2 In Thomas Pfau, ed. and trans., “Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the Science of Knowledge,” in Idealism and The Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F. W. J. Schelling (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 100. 3 Friedrich Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1967), 96. 4 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), § 46. 5 Grammar should serve historical facts whenever possible. Artists and writers until the early 1800s were for the most part male. My use of the masculine set of personal pronouns in reference to artists of that era has mirrored this lopsided demographic fact. When referring to the period after 1800 that concerns us now, I use the pronouns “he” and “she” interchangeably to speak of the artist in general. 6 Friedrich von Schlegel, Athenaeum, Fragment 238, accessed February 12, 2018. http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Schlegel,+Friedrich/Fragmentensammlungen/ Fragmente 7 Friedrich von Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, ed. and trans. Ernst Behler Roman Stulc (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968). 8 Théophile Gautier, L’art Moderne. Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive. n.d. Internet Archive, accessed February 12, 2018. https://archive.org/ details/lartmodernetho00gautuoft

Chapter 5 1 See Dore Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980). 2 Michel Butor, “L’atelier du peintre: Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,” Energeia, no 2 (1996): 5–29; Arthur C. Danto, “The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac,” Unknown Masterpieces: Writers Rediscover Literature’s Hidden Classics (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 13–33; Michel Serres, Genèse (Paris: Grasset, 1982), 26–52. 3 Honoré de Balzac, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” Honoré de Balzac in TwentyFive Volumes (New York: P. F. Collier, 1900), XXII, 18. 4 Ibid., 32. 5 Ibid., 24. 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Goldwater, 295. 8 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (Portland: Thomas Mosher, 1905), 41.

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9 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael T. H. Sadler, accessed February 12, 2018. http://www.semantikon.com/art/kandinskyspirit ualinart.pdf 10 Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003), 68. 11 Dore Ashton, Picasso on Art (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 58. 12 George Braque, Illustrated Notebooks 1917–1955 (Mineola: Dover, 1971), 88. 13 In Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, Volume 2: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York: Routledge, 2000), 129. 14 André Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Penguin, 1996), 7. 15 William Wordsworth, “Ode to Duty” (1805). 16 Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), 380. 17 Balzac, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” 20; 30; 28; 40. 18 Goldwater, 366. 19 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian. Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 308. 20 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (New York: Hackett, 1968), 262. 21 Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1973), 139. 22 Mark Rothko, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 4. 23 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1993), 290. 24 See Richard Kindall, ed., Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters (New York: Timer Warner, 2004), 130. 25 William C. Seitz, Claude Monet (New York: Abrams, 1960), 156. 26 Kindall, 130. 27 Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 205. 28 See Paul Gauguin, The Letters of Paul Gauguin to Georges Daniel de Montfreid, trans. Ruth Pielkovo, accessed February 12, 2018. https://archive.org/stream/ letterspaulgaug00gauggoog#page/n7/mode/2up 29 Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism (Köln: Taschen, 2014), 160. 30 Van Gogh, The Letters, 195. 31 Ibid., 150. 32 Ibid., 454. 33 On the topic of the unfinished in art, see William Tronzo, ed., The Fragment: An Incomplete History (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009); for

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modern art in particular, Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, Volume 3: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: New York University Press, 1998), Chapter 6; and Diane Sharon Brown, The Unfished in Art: Nine Case Studies (Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1990). 34 Delacroix, The Journal, 171. 35 Paul Gauguin, Intimate Journals (London: Routledge, 2013), 33. 36 Ashton, Picasso on Art, 38. 37 Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work (New York: FSG, 2005), 578. 38 In Kelly Baum, ed., Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 208. 39 Clement Greenberg, “American-Type’ Painting,” accessed February 12, 2018. https://monoskop.org/images/c/ce/Greenberg_Clement_1955_1961_AmericanType_Painting.pdf 40 George Braque, “Voice of the Artist—2: The Power of Mystery” (based on statements made to John Richardson) in The Observer, December 1, 1957. 41 Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), 32. 42 Harold Rosenberg, “Some Points about Action Painting,” in Action Painting (Dallas: Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, 1958), 5. 43 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 273–306.

Chapter 6 1 E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951), 88. (I have supplied the numbering.) 2 Henry James, “The Middle Years,” Complete Stories, 1892–1898 (New York: Literary Classics, 1996), 355. 3 Jack Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 9. 4 Goldwater (1974), 170. 5 On this topic, see Paul Barolsky, “The Fable of Failure in Modern Art,” Virginia Quarterly Review 73, no. 3 (1997): 395–404. 6 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Moses,” accessed February 13, 2018. https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SAYLOR-ENGL4053.2-MOSES.pdf 7 See David Ball, False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 8 Clint Brown, Artist to Artist (Ontario: Jackson Creek, 1998), 101. 9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 121.

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10 David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Art Making (Santa Cruz: Image Continuum Press, 2001), 47. 11 Gauguin, The Writings of Savage, 117. 12 Ibid., 134. 13 Van Gogh, 271. Emphasis in original. 14 Emily Dickinson, “It Might Be Lonelier,” Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 293. 15 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II, 1. 16 Jerrold D. Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 263. 17 Voltaire, La Princesse de Babylone (Paris: Editions du livre, 1925), 105 (translation mine). 18 This is explored in Don Thomson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2010) and Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York: Norton, 2009). 19 Harold Rosenberg first used the term in The De-Definition of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 20 Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1983), 141. 21 Ibid., 103. 22 Ibid., 125. 23 See Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947). 24 Calvin Tomkins, Lives of the Artists (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2008), 15.

Chapter 7 1 In Rosemary Lloyd, Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 77. 2 In Barasch, Theories of Art, Volume 3, 76. 3 Tristan Tzara, “Lecture on Dada” [1924], in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborg, 1951), 250. 4 Louis Aragon, “Front Rouge,” last modified August 20, 2014. http://merlerene. canalblog.com/archives/2014/08/20/30473058.html 5 See Alfred Jarry, “Ubu Enchained,” in The Ubu Plays, ed. and trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Grove Press, 1968). 6 In Goldwater (1974), 419. 7 In Undoing Art (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017) Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville argue that destruction is the enduring legacy of the avant-garde. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (New York: Hackett, 1997), 84.

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9 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 95. 10 Ibid., 67. 11 Ibid., 28. 12 Ibid., 131. 13 Jean Calvin, The Institution of the Christian Religion [1561] (London: John Bryce&Archibald McLean, junior, for Alexander Irvine, 1762), 752. 14 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson [1791] (New York: Penguin, 2008), 868. 15 Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Routledge, 2014), 202. 16 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto,” [1909] accessed February 13, 2018. https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manif esto_futurista.pdf; https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manif esto_futurista.pdf. 17 Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, and Other Essays, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: George Wittenborn, 1951), 42. 18 Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Ellen Marriage (New York: Penguin, 1977), 39. 19 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 405. 20 Charles Baudelaire, “Letter to Manet, May 11, 1865,” in Correspondence générale. Vol. 3 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1947), 96–97. 21 Ashton, Picasso on Art, 58. 22 Marinetti, [1909], see note 16. 23 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life.” 24 Clark, The Artist Grows Old. 25 In Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1981), 318. 26 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 99. 27 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. and trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper&Row, 1975), 77. 28 T. S. Eliot, “Contemporanea,” The Egoist 5, no. 6 (1918): 84. 29 Kasimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism (Moscow, 1916), 20. 30 Paul Cézanne, “Letter to Émile Zola, 24 September 1879,” in The Letters of Paul Cézanne, ed. and trans. Alex Danchev (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013). 31 Naum Gabo, “Sculpture: Carving and Construction in Space,” (1937) in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, ed. J. L. Martin and Naum Gabo (London: Faber&Faber, 1937), 109. 32 In Goldwater, 417.

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Chapter 8 1 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man [1486], accessed June 4, 2018. https:// http://bactra.org/Mirandola/ 2 Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now” (1948), in Chipp, 552. 3 Schlegel, Dialogue, 153. 4 One counts at least ten current book titles and dozens of academic articles that announce (and seldom question) the “power of art.” 5 Trilling, 170. 6 In Jaimes Sabartes, Picasso, An Intimate Portrait (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948), 146. 7 Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (1912), in Futurism, ed. Joshua Taylor (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 43. 8 In Hughes (1981), 27. 9 John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 9. 10 Ashton, Picasso on Art, 32. 11 In Umbro Apollonio, Picasso (Novara: Uffici Press, 1954), 8. 12 Berger (1965), 185. 13 Rousseau, Emile, or On Education [1762]. 14 In Sally Featherstone, An Anthology of Educational Thinkers (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 243. 15 Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1991), 88. 16 Ibid., 73. 17 Claudia Mesch, Joseph Beuys: The Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 141. 18 Ibid., 92. 19 S. H. Carson, J. B. Peterson, and D. M. Higgins, “Reliability, Validity and Factor Structure of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire,” Creativity Research Journal, 17 (2005): 37–50; Robert Weisburg, “Expertise and Reason in Creative Thinking,” in Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, ed. James C. Kaufman (Cambridge: The University of Cambridge Press, 2006), 1–42. On the 10,000-hour rule, see K. Anders Ericksson, The Road to Excellence (New York: Psychology Press, 2014). 20 William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1793] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 15. 21 In Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 185. 22 In Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles and Reviews (New York: Harry H. Abrams, 2000), 18. 23 In Miguel Lopez-Remiro, ed., Writings on Art: Mark Rothko (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 36.

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24 In Ellen Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry H. Abrams, 2010), 169. 25 Dore Ashton, ed., The Writings of Robert Motherwell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 31. 26 Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, “The Portrait and the Modern Artist,” in Writings on Art, ed. Miguel Lopez-Remiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 38. 27 P. D. Stokes, Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough (New York: Springer, 2005). 28 Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” in Lopez-Remiro, 59.

Chapter 9 1 Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard (Grenoble: Éditions Glénat, 1988), 177. Emphasis in original. 2 See Edmund Bergler, The Writer and Psychoanalysis (New York: Doubleday, 1950). 3 Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint (London: Routledge, 2010), 150. 4 Ibid., 152. 5 Ibid., 150. 6 Gustave Flaubert, “To Maxime du Camp, 21 May 1851,” in Oeuvres Complètes et Annexes: Correspondance. Arvensa Éditions (Google Books, 2014), 5042 (translations mine). 7 Ibid., “To Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepi, 9 July 1861,” 5680. 8 Flaubert, Selected Letters (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 227. 9 Flaubert (2014), “To Louise Colet, October 1853,” 5373. Emphasis in original. 10 Ibid., “To Louise Colet, Rouen 1847,” 4882. 11 Flaubert (1997), 376. 12 Ibid., 229. 13 Flaubert (2014), “To Louise Colet, 17–18 October 1853,” 5368. 14 Flaubert (1997), 202. 15 Flaubert (2014), “To Eugène Crépet, 15 July 1861,” 5683. 16 Ibid., “To Louise Colet, 19 December 1846,” 4837. 17 Van Gogh, Letters, 281. Emphasis in original. 18 Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 267. 19 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 407. 20 Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce 1928–1941. Vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 1997), 417. 21 In Emanuel Dimas, John Cage: The Silence of Music (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2003), 178.

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22 In Lopez-Remiro, 131. 23 In Clifford Ross, ed., Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics (New York: Abrams Publishers, 1990), 167. 24 On the idea of the absolute work of art among modern artists, Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece. 25 In Lopez-Remiro, 58; 120. 26 Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell Leaska (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984), 13.

Chapter 10 1 Barbara Rose, ed., Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 53. 2 Henri Matisse: Retrospective, Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Catalogue, 1948, 33. 3 Matthew Gale, Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 23. 4 Marc, “How Does a Horse See the World?,” in Chipp, 178. 5 Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art [1937] (New York: Wittenborn, 1945), 61. 6 In David Lewis, Constantin Brancusi (New York: Wittenborn, 1957), 43. 7 Mark Rothko quoted in Lopez-Remiro, 58. 8 James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 386. 9 In Helen Gardner and Christin Mamiya, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, Vol. 2 (London: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005), 1021. 10 Peter Selz, Mark Rothko (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), 14. For further abetting of Rothko-style art transcendentalism, see Pamela Smart, Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2010), as well as Annie Cohen-Solal: Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 11 http://www.rothkochapel.org/visit/visitor-info/ 12 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–37), and votaries: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), accessed February 13, 2018. http://atc.berkeley.edu/201/readings/FriedObjcthd.pdf; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 13 Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (London: Hayward Gallery, 1994). 14 Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism (Kingston: McPherson & Co., 2004), 217.

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15 Claes Oldenburg, “I Am for an Art,” accessed February 13, 2018. https://users.wfu.edu/~laugh/painting2/oldenburg.pdf 16 See Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) and epigones: Ross Posnock, Renunciation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Leo Bersani, Arts of Impoverishment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 17 Octavio Paz, El arco y la lira, accessed February 13, 2018. http://www.ecfrasis.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Octavio-Paz-El-arco-yla-lira.pdf 18 Quoted in Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (New York: Macmillan Press, 1998), 279. 19 See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature [1955] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 20 In Clive Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 386. 21 Rosenberg, “French Silence and American Poetry,” [1959] The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), 89. 22 Quoted in Breslin, Mark Rothko, 306. 23 Yves Klein, Le Dépassement de la problématique de l’art et autres écrits (Paris: ENSA, 2001), 21. 24 Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). 25 Ibid., 5. 26 George Eliot, “A Man Surprised at His Originality,” in Complete Works. Vol. 10 (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1894), 60. 27 Thomas Johnson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: The University of Harvard Press, 1958), 408. 28 Among the most recent examples, Anna Deleuze, Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 29 Sontag, 89. 30 Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 1992), 40.

Chapter 11 1 André Breton and Leon Trotsky, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” (1938). http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism1.htm 2 In Valérie Foucher, Le Nom de l’ennemi: bourgeois et bourgeoisie chez les intellectuels français (Paris: ANRT, 2006), 1.

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3 John Ruskin, The Complete Works (New York: Bryan, Taylor and Co., 1898), 8; 307. 4 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 2; 147. 5 Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays (London: Collins, 1968), 112. See also César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic, 1964). 6 Gustave Flaubert, “Letter to George Sand, May 10, 1867,” Oeuvres complètes et Annexes: Correspondance (Arvensa Éditions, 2014), 5883. 7 Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Norton, 1998), 24. 8 In Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 23. 9 See Maleuvre, The Art of Civilization (2016). 10 In Chipp (1968), 376. 11 See Baudelaire, “Dedication ‘Aux Bourgeois’,” in Salon of 1846. https://fr.wiki source.org/wiki/Salon_de_1846 12 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Love of Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 13 Marina Fokidis, “Hijacking Cultural Policies: Art as the Healthy Virus within Social Strategies of Resistance,” in The State and the Arts: Articulating Power and Subversion, ed. Judith Kapferer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 42–51. 14 Joseph Beuys, “I am Searching for Field Character,” in Art Into Society, Society Into Art, trans. Caroline Tisdall (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974), 97. 15 See Jerrold D. Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2012), esp. Chapter 14. 16 Richard Kostelanetz, A Dictionary of the Avant Garde (London: Routledge, 2013), 652. 17 Tzara, 249. 18 Paul Nash, Outline: An Autobiography and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 211. 19 See Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth – Avant Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 20 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 31, and his “On the Social Situation of Music,” in Telos 35 (1978). 21 Bersani, 7; 9. 22 Beckett, Three Dialogues, 103. 23 See Joseph Anderton. 24 Paul Celan, “Tübingen, January,” Afterimage, last revised October 13, 2011. https://erinmizrahi.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/tubingen-january-paul-celan

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25 Gay (2007), 179. 26 Martin, 36. 27 In Lisa Le Feuvre, ed., Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 159—a source book for studying the Sisyphean complex of modern and contemporary art. 28 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 159. 29 See Jennifer Gough-Cooper, ed., Marcel Duchamp, Work and Life: Ephemerides (Cambridge: MIT Press,1993). 30 In Paul Wood, Conceptual Art (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002), 27. 31 Remy de Gourmont, “L’Oeil de Monet,” in Promenades Philosophiques, 2nd Series (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 220–25. 32 In Ashton (1972), 31. 33 Gough-Cooper, 67. 34 Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 92. 35 McEvilley, 27. 36 John Dewey, Art and Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), 342. 37 Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

Chapter 12 1 About half the essays in Noel Caroll’s Theories of Art Today (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) are for example not concerned with works of art but with what their definitions of art say the works have to be. 2 Van Gogh, 206. 3 In Alexander Alberro, ed., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press), 164. 4 See Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” MIT Press 16 (1981): 69–86; Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Haven Publications, 1984) and After the End of Art (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1997); Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Donald Kuspit observes a less cheering tone in The End of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5 Danto, After the End of Art. 6 Ad Reindhart, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reindhart, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1991), 13.

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7 Jacques Vaché, “Letter to André Breton, August 18, 1917,” in Lettres de guerre (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1919). 8 Danto (1997), 47. 9 Albert-Lászlo Barabási, Samuel Fraiberger et al., “Quantifying Reputation and Success in Art,” Science, November 08, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1126/science. aau7224 10 Bersani (1993), 101, 127. 11 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1992), 90, 93. 12 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), 14. Emphasis in original. 13 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: University of Harvard Press, 1976), 214. 14 Clément Rosset, Le Choix des mots (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1995), 134 (translation mine). 15 Tomkins, 20. 16 See also in Damien Hirst, “On Dumb Painting,” in I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, ed. Robert Violette (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1997), 45–47.

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INDEX

Abstract Expressionism 122, 158, 160–1, 170, 177 abstraction 177 action painting 57, 125 Adorno, Theodor 193, 194, 196 Alberti 7 Alexander, Peter 24 Alÿs 197 Amleth 21 Andersen, Hans Christian 214 anti-art 66–7, 89, 93, 103 anti-fiction 73, 78–9, 89 Antony and Cleopatra 31 Aretino 63, 64 Aristotle 15, 80, 124 art alienation 33 art about art 112 bad art 64, 90, 113, 138, 142 commerce 132–3, 187, 188, 190–1 de-definition 134, 139, 204 destruction 143–6 economics 147 end of 8, 140, 169, 193, 194, 202–14 essence 174–7 frustration 4, 37, 43–4, 123, 136 insecurity 3, 112 institutionalized 101–2, 178–9, 199–201, 211 intellectualism 28, 58, 102, 194–5, 203–4, 210, 211 invention of 85 mediocrity 113 moralism 185, 186, 189 mysticism 173, 183, 203–4, 211–12

old age 59, 61–2, 149–51 patronage 128, 132–3, 147, 177, 192, 205, 211 politics 186–7, 191–2, 195, 201 process of 4, 125 religion of 129–30, 138, 178 tragic 15, 18 transcendence of 37, 175–6, 179, 182–3, 187, 193 triumph of 121, 138 silence 181–5 spontaneity 161 subversion of 7, 113, 143–6 art criticism 11, 141–2, 184, 203, 204, 108, 211, 212 artist, cult of 39–41, 133, 209 artistic autonomy 113, 118, 119, 121, 128 contradiction 128 Romanticism 129 artistic block 16, 44, 95 Hamlet 31, 33 legend of 164–73 psychology 165 Romanticism 110, 164 uses of 170–1 Augustine 40, 57 authenticity (legend of) 174, 176–7 avant-garde 64, 90, 121, 133, 138–40, 144, 151, 180 legend of 176–7, 196 Baldessari, John 207 Balzac 9, 116, 147, 202 baroque 85, 93 Barzun, Jacques 5 Bataille 182 Baudelaire 148, 149, 155, 189

INDEX

Blanchot 170, 182 Beckett 94, 140, 169, 182, 184–5, 193 Berger, John 159 Bergler, Edmund 165 Bernini 107 Beuys 160, 190, 209–10 Blake 160 Bloom, Harold 9, 24, 29, 35, 70 Boccioni 150, 158 bohemian 135–6 Boorstin, Daniel 70 Borges 97, 98 bourgeoisie 186–9, 195–6 Bradley, A.C. 17 Brancusi 175, 176, 196 Braque 119, 125, 158, 174 Brecht 195 Breton, André 119, 180, 209 Bronzino 65 Brooke, Rupert 151 Brown, Norman 165 Bruno, Giordano 64, 119 Buren, Daniel 180, 208 Burn, Ian 205 Cage, John 171 Calderón 74 Calvin 146 Calvino 89 Camus 7 Carlyle 187 Cavell, Stanley 213 Celan 193 Cervantes artistic block 95 disenchantment 72, 90, 97 failure 72 modernity 5, 69, 87, 99 modern novel 70, 90 realism 87–8 Cézanne 60, 116, 121, 123, 155 Chardin 134 Chatterton 181 Christian, Christianity 8, 39, 40, 57, 100, 189 Clark, Kenneth 59, 151 Classicism 107, 108

247

Coleridge 11, 115, 164 conceptual art 150, 197, 205–7, 212 contemporary art 17, 133, 134, 152–3, 199, 213–14 Coriolanus 30 Corneille 93, 107 Corot 60 Courbet 118 craft 42, 54, 138, 160, 204, 206, 213 creativity contradiction 158 history 157–8, 159 legend of 7, 40, 157–63 psychology 159–60 Critical Theory 190–1, 195 Dada

133, 139, 188, 196–7, 208, 212 Dalí 7, 132 Dante 134 Danto, Arthur 117, 201 David (sculpture) 46–7, 55, 57 Davis, Miles 7 De Belleforest, Francis 21 De Gourmont 199 De Holanda 42 De Kooning, Wilhem 124, 125 Delacroix 60 Desengaño 72 destruction, legend of 143–5 Dewey, John 200 Dickinson, Emily 157, 183 Diderot 108, 169 Donatello 45, 46 Don Quixote 70 anti-fiction 73, 78 anti-anti-fiction 82–3 Counter-Renaissance 72–3 decadence 9–10, 63, 97–8, 113 disbelief 73, 74, 76 exhaustion 93, 160 modernity 73 novel (genre) 94 parody 93–4 Spanish history 72, 86 Duchamp, Marcel 121, 138–9, 142, 153, 198–201, 204, 205, 208–9

248

Eagleton, Terry 99 Eliot, T.S. 16, 146, 148, 154, 157 Enlightenment 1, 2 expressionism 116 failure artistic 6, 113, 134–6, 138, 140–1 Cervantes 72 Don Quixote 92 Fielding, Henry 108 Flaubert 92, 124, 167–9 Fontenelle 148 freedom 55 Hamlet 15–6, 34 Michelangelo 55 society 134 fiction 82, 83, 86 misapprehension 84 psychology 79–81 weakness of 83–7, 99 Flanagan, Bob 180 Flaubert 92, 124, 167–9, 187 Flaying of Marsyas (painting) 67–8 Forster, E. M. 128 Fox, Terry 180 freedom artistic 42 artistic block 65 Hamlet 27 legend of 7, 40, 42, 65, 116 modernity 2 philosophy 117 politics 117 will 27, 28 Friedrich 182 Fuentes, Carlos 70 Futurism 143, 150 Gabo, Naum 155 Gauguin 6, 116, 123, 125, 136 Gautier, Théophile 112 Gay, Peter 187 genius 109, 113 Giacometti 60 Goethe 21, 29, 120 Goodman, Nelson 121 Gorky, Maxim 125, 162

INDEX

Greenberg, Clement 121 Greenblatt, Stephen 5 Günter, Grass 94 Haacke, Hans 192 Hamblet 21 Hamilton, Richard 116 Hamlet acting 20, 23–4, 28 alienation 21, 22, 34, 38 authenticity 18, 19, 22 creation of 3–4 critic of modernity 5 failure 15–16 fiction 22, 24, 34, 38 intelligence 21–2 madness 29 modernity 17, 22, 31, 34, 35 nihilism 22 revenge drama 32 Romanticism 23, 37 self-consciousness 17–18, 19, 23–4 Shakespeare 25–8 sincerity 26, 28–9, 37 solipsism 107 stage 17–18, 19, 23, 24, 31, 207 Hazlitt, William 16, 38 Hegel 30, 108, 207 Heidegger 154, 179 Heizer, Michael 176 High Renaissance 5, 6, 39, 40 Hirst, Damien 133, 142, 213 Hobbes 107 Hölderlin 111 Huizinga, Johan 187 humanism 40 iconoclasm Hamlet 19, 20 Modernist 143–5 ideology 75, 76–7, 78 Impressionist 57, 143 innovation art 155 cultural 153–4 science 154 social 146

INDEX

James, Henry 130–1 James, William 134 Jarry, Alfred 144 Johns, Jasper 135 Johnson, Samuel 146–7 Joyce 171 Judd, Donald 132, 199 Julius Caesar 31 Jung 147, 148 Kafka 123, 172 Kandinsky 117, 119, 155 Kant 2, 109, 128 Keats 111–12 Klee, Paul 150, 151 Klein, Yves 179–80, 182 Kline, Franz 122 Koons, Jeff 133, 176 Kosuth, Joseph 133, 205–6 Kyd, Thomas 33 landscape art 177, 181 Lanham, Richard 24 Laocoon 55 La Rochefoucauld 60 Last Judgment (fresco) 57, 62–3 Laurentian Library 43, 172–3 Lawrence, D.H. 186, 187 Leonardo 58, 59, 60 Levin, Harry 70 Lope de Vega 74 Lugones, Leopold 93 Macbeth 30 Machiavelli 107 Madame Bovary 167, 168 Magritte 170, 172 Malevich 119, 120, 154, 171, 174, 175 Mallarmé 143, 169 Manet 149 Mann, Thomas 189 mannerism 39, 63, 64, 65 Marc, Franz 175 Marinetti 150 Martin, Agnes 184, 197 Matisse 117, 119, 132, 172 Medici Chapel 57, 59, 65–7 Melville 101–2, 134

249

meta-fiction 82–3, 89–90, 93 Michelangelo anti-art 66 creative freedom 41–2, 44, 49, 52, 55 doubt 46, 47, 61, 66–7 early work 45–6 failure 55, 123 frustration 42–5, 48, 53, 54, 56 legend of 40–1 modernity 5, 41, 52, 66 painting 48, 49, 61 sculpting 49 middle class 108, 135–6, 147, 187–9, 195 Milner, Marion 165 Milton 107 minimalism 171, 180, 184, 197, 212 Miró 121 Modernist 88, 90, 98 modernity alienation 37 authenticity 176 contradictions 3, 149–50, 215 cultural depletion 91, 99, 94–5, 151, 163 decadence 9–10, 63, 98, 101, 115, 149, 151–2 decoration 177–8 demystification 1, 2, 5, 8–9, 11, 70–1, 74 disillusionment 5, 67, 72, 78, 94 doubt 4–5, 10, 115, 123 illiberal 132, 153, 198, 201, 204, 206, 210 intellectuality 11, 28, 132, 145–6, 194–5, 204–6 legend of 76–8, 82–3, 87, 147, 196, 215 misnomer 98 novel 70–1, 94 objectivity 1 politics 132, 186–8, 191–2, 195, 201 self-consciousness 22 Shakespeare 29, 38 subjectivist 76 tragedy 37

250

Mondrian 175 Monet 122, 123, 124, 126, 199 Montaigne 77, 85 Montesquieu 209 Motherwell, Robert 125, 138, 162 Murakami, Takashi 133 Murdoch, Iris 59 museum 148–50, 178, 199, 202 Nabokov, Vladimir 74 Nash, Paul 193 neoaristocratic 138–9, 153, 197–8, 206–7 neoplatonic 52, 57, 75 Newman, Barnett 158, 161 Nietzsche 10, 11, 60, 144–5 Novalis 160 novelty contemporary art 152 contradiction 148 history 146 legend of 1, 74–5, 93, 94, 96, 146–51 modernity 1, 71, 74–5 Oldenberg, Claes 181 Origen 57 Ortega y Gasset 70 Othello 18, 141 Pallas Athena 204, 214 Paolina Chapel 49, 64 Parmigianino 65 parody 70–1 Pascal 77, 85 Paz, Octavio 181 performance art 180 Philip II 74, 86 Piaget, Jean 159 Picasso 7, 116, 119, 125, 144, 149, 156, 158–9 Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quixote 97–8 Pieta (sculpture) 45–6 Plato 75, 129, 186, 204 Pollock, Jackson 117, 122, 125, 126, 161–2

INDEX

Pontormo 57, 63, 65 Pop Art 180, 212 post-art 180–1, 201, 209 Postmodern 83, 86, 88, 98, 204, 210 Pound, Ezra 147, 148, 151 progressivism 152–3 Protagoras 40 Proust 154 public (decline of) 131–2, 153, 198, 210 Quatremère de Quincy 102 rationalism 196 readymades 138, 199–200 realism 84, 97–8 Reformation 76 Reinhardt, Ad 208 Reynolds, John 60 Rilke 116 Rimbaud 135, 147, 181 Rivette, Jacques 117 Rodin 43, 54, 60, 144 Romanticism anti-romantic 92 contradictions 110–11 creativity 158 decadence 9, 100, 113 failure 113, 134, 181, 199 freedom 6 genius 109 Germany 109 Hamlet 30 intellect 155 lassitude 111, 112, 124, 137 origins 108, 109 preciosity 112, 199, 202 poetry 109–11 politics 186 spontaneity 6 subjectivism 79, 109, 205 transcendence 22 Rosenberg, Harold 125, 161, 182 Rothko 122, 161, 162–3, 172–3, 177–9, 182 Ruskin 187

INDEX

Sartre 135 Schelling 109, 110 Schiele 119 Schiller 109 Schlegel 110, 158 Schoenberg 117 scientific rationality 84, 86, 152 Shakespeare as artist 26–8, 31 disenchantment 16, 38 modernity 29, 38 society 138 stagecraft 28–9, 31 theatrical profession 25–8 Shelley 108, 112 sincerity 23–4 Sistine Chapel creation of 50–2 errors 51 origin 47–8 Shaftsbury 16 themes 51, 52 solipsism 81 Sontag, Susan 182–3, 212 Sorel, Charles 92 Stella, Frank 174 Stendhal 164 Sterne 92, 108, 166, 167 Still, Clifford 122, 133, 161 Strachey, Lytton 16 Stravinsky 146 subjectivism language 75–6 legend of 76–8, 84 romantic 108, 119–10 subversion (Legend of) 186–201, 206 Surrealism 122, 132, 155, 160, 170 Taine, Hippolyte 187 Tasso 65 The Tempest 33–4 Tintoretto 57, 64, 67 Titian 59, 60, 63–4, 67–8 Tolstoy 3 tradition 11, 215 tragedy 16 transcendence

251

Hamlet 22, 23 modernity 2, 22 transgression (legend of) 191–2 Trilling, Lionel 3, 70, 158 Tristram Shandy 166 Trotsky 186 Turner, J.M.W. 60 Twain, Mark 85 Twelfth Night 18 Tzara 139, 144, 192–3 unfinished (artistic style) antiquity 58 Don Quixote 91–2 legend of 91–2, 126 Leonardo 60–1 Michelangelo 56–7, 61, 66 modern style 57–8, 60, 121, 124, 125, 126 non-finito 57–8, 59, 67 Renaissance 58–61 Romanticism 6, 110, 124, 137 Unknown Masterpiece 9, 116–20, 123, 129–30, 134, 143, 148, 155, 177, 202–3 Ur-Hamlet 21, 24–5, 33 Vaché, Jacques 209 Valéry 7 Van Gogh 60, 116, 124, 136–7, 168, 204 Vasari 40, 41, 48, 50, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63 Velázquez 74 Virgil 123 Voltaire 139, 197 Warhol 122, 132, 191, 192 Wilde, Oscar 118 Winnicott 159, 160 Wodiczko, Krzytof 190 Woolf, Virginia 5, 171, 173 Wordsworth 113–14, 119 Zola 135 Zuccari, Federico 64 Zurbarán 74