Yesterday we published the first in a series of responses from art critics, historians and theorists to Sean Tatol’s issue 37 essay “After the Post-Avant-Garde.” What, James Elkins asked in his reflection, does Tatol mean by notoriously flighty concepts like “quality” and “taste”? What happens when you keep in mind their historical contingency? Read on for Tatol’s reply.
First of all, I’m thankful to James Elkins for his response; I’m a fan of his work and his reply is generously attentive. And overall I agree—a definition of quality against the “neo-premodernist” usage of it does need to be expanded upon in ways that have occupied my mind recently. It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve come to understand that what I mean by the word is particular to the experience of digital-native millennials and needs articulating, as I’ve never seen taste and quality discussed in a way that accounts for the ways in which those terms have changed now that the predominant mode of exposure to the arts has shifted from the mediation of normative canons, institutions and physical media to the relatively unstructured and overwhelmingly immense archive of the internet.
I also entirely agree with the assertion Elkins borrows from T.J. Clark (Farewell to an Idea is a favorite of mine) that an artwork’s singularity refers to its historical contingency. By singular, though, I don’t mean uniqueness to the point of incommunicability, as he seems to understand it from his reference to Jean Louis Schefer. Rather, an artwork becomes singular by means of the context it operates in. To use an easy example: there are many minor mid-century abstract painters whose works look broadly similar to one another, or like a pastiche of more famous artists, but a de Kooning is singular by comparison. His work distinguishes itself within the generic category of Abstract Expressionism, thanks to his painterly touch and sensibility, or even what we could call his “taste.” It seems undeniable to me that his work stands out from other gesturally abstract painters from his historical period, and that difference is what I have in mind when I refer to quality and singularity. To jump ahead a bit, maybe the crux of my disagreement with Elkins is that I don’t think accepting de Kooning as a canonized painter automatically implies ideological fealty to a rigidly orthodox canon. Adhering to a canon can be that if approached dogmatically, which is the danger of neo-premodernism. But one can just as readily see de Kooning’s paintings as historically contingent artistic accomplishments. Appreciating what was a realization of art’s possibilities in the past doesn’t need to (and should not) dictate the scope of possibilities in the present, but comprehending past achievements in context is a useful means for coming to understand what artistic achievement looks like, as well as clarifying what may be possible now.
I’ve never quite understood how it was that, sometime in the last half-century, art writers decided taste was a bad word. Do they just as flatly reject the idea of a good restaurant as historically contingent? I’d see the point if someone’s approval of restaurants hinged strictly on whether or not the waiter carves your prime rib at the table, but, on the other hand, some taco trucks are better than others. Judgment is simply inextricable from experience, in food as in art, and I fail to see what’s gained by denying that. More to the point, isn’t asserting an absolute prohibition on taste an inversion of the absolutism that asserts taste as objective truth? From my point of view, it’s more productive to exercise one’s discernment while accepting that your judgments are limited and contingent than it is to demur from the practice altogether.
This divergence seems to lead Elkins to miss my point regarding the list of artists that I’d include in a wider historical canon. He seems to be protesting against the canonicity of the names I’ve listed, which makes them conventional, but my point is precisely that this sort of contemporary canon is so heterogeneous that it marks a significant development beyond the conservatism of a timeless Western Canon of those who would retreat from everything since modernity. Crucially, and precisely to the point Elkins is making, this multiplicity emphasizes the contingency of all canons, and therefore makes possible the self-awareness of the limited biases in all tastes, including one’s own. The key is that I think this calls for more qualitative judgments, not their suspension.
The operative word in my list is “a love of Shakespeare but also for Cao Xuequin,” which is to say a personal investment in the art mentioned, not merely names dropped to assert one’s educational legitimacy. This is what differentiates it from the narrowness of the traditional canon that fetishizes the objective superiority of masterpieces; having a deep appreciation for a range of art that is too global and too postmodern to reconcile with the norms of European art history creates a concept of artistic quality that, while still historically contingent, is much less deterministic than is implied by those who are averse to words like “taste” and “judgment.”
Perhaps what Elkins aims to forswear by insisting upon historical contingency is the possibility of claims to objectivity, and again I agree. But, as someone of a post-postmodern generation, I can’t help but see the suspension of judgment as a capitulation to a relativism that’s at the root of all our unmoored millennial ennui. The simple reconciliation is that while art may be wholly subjective, subjectivity itself is wholly qualitative. That is what criticism should be grounded in, a subjective judgment of the subjective content of art that reflects the subjectivity of the artist. This is an old concept of criticism, as Schlegel was already arguing in 1798: “Many of the very best novels are compendia, encyclopedias of the whole spiritual life of a brilliant individual.”
This seems to me to be an obvious fact of any major work of art, excepting that in our day and age we’re liable to choke on the phrase “the whole spiritual life of a brilliant individual.” Nor am I suggesting that we should force it back into use. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Schlegel’s observation is true. In less grandiose terms, I was drawn to the arts as a depressed teenager because I had the impression that coming to understand art and artists would eventually, somehow, take me out of my depression. And eventually it did. As Marguerite Duras puts it in “I Thought Often…,” “There is no happiness other than that of intelligence. I think people like Rousseau, Montaigne, Diderot all attained it.” That line has stuck in my mind for years because it translates Schlegel’s sentiment into one we, or at least I, can stomach in the 21st century.
Another, likely better word for singularity could be artistic autonomy, in Adorno’s sense of the term. Autonomy is always wrested from and therefore dependent on the historical contingencies that inform the scope of artistic possibility. Or the contemporary, in Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?”: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it.” This is the dialectical creation of the subject. In other words, it is only from our engagement with the history of art that we can become familiar, over time, with what a great work of art is like, which is to say the canon mediates our subjectivity at the same time that we subjectively mediate the canon. Taste generally, or perhaps always, develops in relation to some social context that informs one’s sense of art. Only chance and long exposure lead to one’s subjective ability to meaningfully judge art, which is to say that one internalizes a sense of judgment, received from outside through art, which is thus not particularly subjective in any meaningful sense. Neither is it objective, because these judgments, being historically contingent, are always being mediated by the limitations of the subject, by social context, by historical vantage and so on. What matters for criticism is not the objectivity of quality but whether or not the critic can discern quality for themselves in a way that is useful for others. Criticism and judgment are always communicative, incomplete pursuits.
The roundtable will continue in the coming weeks with responses from Alex Kitnick and Joe Bucciero. Chicago readers can continue the conversation this Thursday, September 17th, at Gertie, where we’ll be cohosting a panel discussion with Sean about his essay. (New Yorkers who want to talk about the essay—and the rest of the issue—should come to our issue 37 release party the following Tuesday!)
Previously in the roundtable:
Sean Tatol’s essay for issue 37, “After the Post-Avant-Garde.”
James Elkins’s response, “What Is Quality?”
Plus, reading from the archive: Sean Tatol’s essay for issue 30, “Negative Criticism.”
Such a great read. The gap between “taste is subjective” and “therefore judgment is meaningless” is pretty important here. It almost feels like we overcorrected from the old idea that taste could be objective and universal, and are now wary to make any judgments at all. Just because taste is socially shaped doesn’t make it fake. If anything, it makes it more interesting. Our judgments are built from exposure and context, so the useful question is how we came to trust our judgments in the first place.
"...while art may be wholly subjective, subjectivity itself is wholly qualitative."
Thank you for this, and for the thought that quality has something to do with happiness.
This feels like a promising way out of the dungeon of postmodern relativism.