The Empire Strikes Back

Journal entry for 03 May 2011 | Link

Spring is Here

It seems that we just got through with a tough winter, but Spring is rocketing by. Out of the house with the camera we go.

Garden, Boston, May 2, 2011

Cat in Window, Boston, May 2, 2011

This Week in Clembashing

Last Monday saw the opening of Anthony Caro on the Roof at the Met. Ken Johnson noted the occasion in the customary manner.

The authoritarian, arch-formalist critic Clement Greenberg was an admirer, friend and studio consultant. With characteristically imperious self-assurance, he told an interviewer in 1968, “Anthony Caro is a major artist—the best sculptor to come up since David Smith.”

Something about that seems off, even for the Clembashing genre. Allow me to illustrate:

With characteristically imperious self-assurance, he sidled up to the sultriest vixen at the bar and ordered two bourbons neat.

Or even:

With characteristically imperious self-assurance, he invaded Poland.

That is, the proclamation in question doesn't look like the stuff of empire. Johnson, immediately after noting that Minimalism eclipsed Caro's "sweet, formal lyricism" by 1970, nevertheless blames Greenberg for Caro's efforts to better his work.

After the ’60s, the idiosyncratic exuberance and delight in sensory experience of Mr. Caro’s early work is overridden by a determination to uphold the presumably enduring values of high Modernism. You wonder if the influences of friends like Greenberg and [Michael] Fried, who dismissed most new art of the ’60s as merely entertaining novelties, may have helped to suppress Mr. Caro’s more imaginatively innovative side and to inflate a more grandiose ambition.

Remarking on Mr. Caro’s roots in English tradition, Greenberg wrote in a 1965 essay, “Without maintaining necessarily that he is a better artist than Turner, I would venture to say that Caro comes closer to a genuine grand manner — genuine because original and un-synthetic — than any English artist before him.” No artist should take that kind of statement seriously, but it seems that Mr. Caro found it hard to resist.

Is it impossible that by the time the '60s were over and Minimalism was attempting an austere, even monastic version of Modernist sculpture, floor-mounted, brightly-colored steel constructions were starting to look a little quaint even to the people who invented them? Apparently so. I have already pointed out Johnson as officialdom's staunchest defender, and if officialdom believes anything, it believes that if Greenberg praised an artist, subsequent appreciation must lament or rehabilitate the association. James Panero, writing for this month's issue of the New Criterion, notes as much regarding the catalogue essay for Kenneth Noland: Paintings 1958–1968 at Mitchell-Inness & Nash.

[The authors'] singular aim, it seemed, was to liberate Noland from his close association with the critic Clement Greenberg: “Greenberg’s influence—as a brilliant but ultimately limiting formalist—is only one of many reasons why Noland’s art looked the way it did and why it assumed its deserved place at the forefront of America’s contemporary art production.” ...

Perhaps the art market demands the exorcism of Clem, but I still find his singular influence to be an argument in support of Noland’s place in art history. Is it possible to think of Noland without recalling that iconic photograph of Greenberg observing one of the artist’s circles, with Greenberg’s head and torso cocked to the side as if being spun around by the design?

The other problem with removing Greenberg is that this elevates Noland’s other big influence, Wilhelm Reich. An Austrian protegé of Sigmund Freud, Reich believed in the unseen universal forces of “Orgones,” libidinal energies named after the orgasm that could be harnessed through “Orgone Boxes” and used to control the weather. Noland, who like many artists was in Reichian therapy for years, said he became “immersed in it” in 1958 and had Orgone Boxes built at his homes in suburban Washington and later in Vermont. Since Reich eventually was shut down by the government for operating a sex-based fraud, it says something about Greenberg’s current status that one’s association with a quack is better than being connected with modernism’s greatest American critic.

At one point I was entertaining the idea of writing a book about the history of Clembashing. The art market could never have bloated into the multi-billion-dollar empire it became based on the judgment exemplified by Greenberg. That expansion required that as many people as possible think of Greenberg as a benighted, retrogressive figure. And it has found a way to do so, backed up by a pliant academia, tendentious museological programming, and critics like Johnson.

The book idea was nixed by no less than Jenny van Horne. "I'm not going to go along with you on that," she told me in her Central Park West apartment in March. "Clem always reminded everyone that the truth will out. After enough time goes by, all these writers and academics who made their careers out of bashing Clem will be forgotten. And they'll be forgotten because they weren't good enough."

I think she's correct. A book remains to be written, but not that one.

Readings from the Bowels of Academia

Caleb Crain on In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic:

X and his wife got snookered in the housing bubble, and he wonders if the misery in his classroom might result from a similar education bubble. In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in America; in 2006, there were 20.5 million. In X’s opinion, a glut of degrees has led to a spurious inflation of the credentials required for many jobs. Tuitions are rising, and two-thirds of college graduates now leave school with debt, owing on average about $24,000. A four-year degree is said to increase wages about $450,000 over the course of a lifetime, but X doubts the real value of degrees further down on the hierarchy of prestige. To him, the human cost is more conspicuous. A recent study of about 3,000 graduates of Boston public high schools found that although two-thirds went on to college, only 675 had earned a degree of any kind, including a one-year certificate, seven years later. Upon learning of the study, The Boston Globe called for a campaign against student attrition. X, by contrast, worries about the waste of effort and the emotional toll of mass discouragement.

Malcome Harris:

While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. ... If the comparative model is valid, then the lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when the kids can’t pay? The federal government only uses data on students who default within the first two years of repayment, but its numbers have the default rate increasing every year since 2005. Analyst accounts have only 40 percent of the total outstanding debt in active repayment, the majority being either in deferment or default. Next year, the Department of Education will calculate default rates based on numbers three years after the beginning of repayment rather than two. The projected results are staggering: recorded defaults for the class of 2008 will nearly double, from 7 to 13.8 percent. With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except by taking on more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.