Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review’s essay for our latest issue, “After the Post-Avant-Garde,” asks: What happened to coolness in art? His answer, in tracing a trajectory from the avant-garde to the late avant-garde to the post-avant-garde through artists like Andrea Fraser, Lutz Bacher and Bill Hayden, offers an ambitious diagnosis of the art world today, and why it might be time for artists to abandon the notion of the avant-garde. The essay has sparked a range of reactions in the art world: enthusiasm, skepticism, vehement disagreement. To continue the conversation, we’ve organized a roundtable of responses from other art critics and art historians to think seriously about the questions the essay raises, which you’ll find here on Substack and on our website in the coming weeks. First up: James Elkins, an art historian and critic at SAIC and the author of the experimental novel Five Strange Languages.
Plus: our artistically minded readers in Chicago shouldn’t miss a Chicago Exhibition Week event we’re cohosting next Thursday, September 17th, featuring Sean Tatol in conversation with Troy Sherman about his essay.
Ever since Peter Plagens nominated me the principal critic of art critics (I think he was irritated at the time, because I’d been writing about him), I’ve been doing my best to keep up with the field. It’s an impossible task, partly because criticism happens in different languages, but mainly because only a few critics write position papers. Perhaps since Jerry Saltz—but really, in the end, as with many topics in criticism, since Clement Greenberg—it’s been considered ill-advised for a critic to reveal consistency in their criteria. Sean Tatol is an exception in that regard, so he’s an especially interesting critic to watch.
Much of what he writes is negotiations and truces with established positions, and the accommodations he reaches are often hard to disagree with. He has argued against artworks that are easily assimilated into intellectual programs, that mistake technological changes for real innovation, that broadcast their politics to the detriment of content, that run too close to the art market’s publicity machine, and that privilege theoretical schemata over affective power or visual force. He is sensitive to the fact that contemporary criticism has abandoned judgment (my starting place in this subject) and that criticism has developed a tendency to retreat into conservative modernism.
He values incomprehension and sustained attention, both subjects I’ve tried to articulate and promote. The first sounds good in the abstract—who wouldn’t want to be stopped in their tracks by a strange artwork?—but is hard to locate in contemporary art criticism, where critics prefer to think of their uncertainty as an effect of their attention to postmodern complexity. For the many skeptics of our current screen culture, critics who advocate paying sustained attention to visual art can sound intuitively, unimpeachably right, but the art world still has almost no place for extended writing on extended encounters. (People like to cite T.J. Clark’s Sight of Death, but when was the last time any art magazine published something like that?)
Tatol’s invectives against “neo-premodernism,” the crypto-conservative return to modernist canons, are especially perspicuous (“Gimmicks of Future Past,” 2024). Terry Smith has called that tendency “remodernism,” and it happens in other arts as well. It haunts the literary corner of Substack, where writers lead faithful, philologically attentive readings of canonical works from Dante to Eliot. (For example, Carson Brakke at Glutenberg Press is leading a Paradise Lost reading; Vashik Armenikus has led readings of the Divine Comedy and the Odyssey; Sean Berube at The Culturist hosts meetings on various classical texts.) The aesthetic values they uncover are imagined to be timeless, and the authors’ command of technique is both the goal of reading and the proof of “quality.” (I find it nearly impossible to insert questions of the history of taste into those discussions. To believe in “neo-premodernism” you have to inoculate yourself against historical change.)
So, lots to agree with. And yet Tatol is also after something he calls quality, and even though it’s an historically moderated sense of quality, still it stands on its own and even depends on the artwork’s uniqueness. From “Gimmicks of Future Past”:
In the end this is to say something simple: what matters in an artwork is its singularity, one that is achieved qualitatively, not through categorical affirmations of novelty or tradition. Quality lies in the specificity of the artwork and its acuity of effect, whatever that effect may be.
Singularity, as T.J. Clark defines it in the essay on Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat in the still-underread Farewell to an Idea, is to do with that painting’s “contingency”: its effectively unprecedented response to a suddenly present politics. That is historical context. Singularity, on the other hand, is a tempting ahistorical solipsism. For years I’ve taught the also-underread Jean Louis Schefer, who wrote himself into that corner in books like The Deluge, The Plague. The book is close to unreadable on account of its fidelity to its author’s conviction that a unique object should be answered by a text that is equally singular. His unreproducible evocation of the supposedly specially unreproducible nature of Paolo Uccello’s painting (as distinct from the routinely unreproducible fact of any original painting) buys its force at the expense of legibility. Stephen Bann may be correct, in his foreword to the book, in assigning it Peirce’s semiotic category of the “sinsign,” the unique and untranslatable response, in writing, to a unique and untranslatable object. It’s the same cul-de-sac as the one Wittgenstein took from G. E. Moore and used as a motto: “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Still, I do teach the text, and the ideas behind it, because a lot of what’s said about the uniqueness of some visual objects leads in that direction.
Tatol’s observations about singularity are sensible as a reaction against “categorical affirmations” but less convincing as a way to ground the notoriously flighty concept of quality. It’s a modernist concept, as he knows, and it’s catnip to neo-premodernists, as he also knows. But what, aside from those, is it? When it appears by itself, as it does in the sentence I quote, it is ahistorical. I would have preferred it if he’d qualified quality: for example by listing the points of comparison—Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges de La Tour, John Currin and others, in that essay—and by saying what, at this particular point, he wants from the word “quality.” (Why not put more pressure on “acuity,” since the grammar of his sentence implies the two are codependent?) In my dealings with the Substack community, I’m sometimes at pains to pry the analyses apart from their dependence on words like “quality” and “taste.”
A couple of years ago, I fulminated a bit over an essay by Henry Oliver called “How to have good taste: Taste is knowledge,” which proposed that it’s possible “to experience the heights of human accomplishment” by “knowing what you are reading, watching, or hearing” and “narrowing” and “limiting” what you like. My reply:
This is terribly depressing. Taste is historically contingent. Many threads here keep returning to that, and Henry keeps replying, “Give me examples.” Henry, that’s not actually a question, because you’ll necessarily judge examples according to your idea of taste. You won’t find new canons that way. Try the epic of King Kesar, the world’s longest book before modernism and computers. Try the Narada Purana. Try the “vase-shaped pillar testament.” Try the Chinese Epic of Darkness. But before you do, forswear using words like “taste,” “canon,” “judgment,” and “aesthetics” because they are all European post-Renaissance constructions. There are many reasons to read that do not engage those ideas. It’s depressing because taste has always underwritten values other than aesthetic ones, and it has always erased politics and naturalized society, and as long as you resist that you continuously mistake the local for the universal, pleasure for meaning, knowledge for understanding.
I think the same is true of quality. It’s doubly hexed: first by a certain Westernness that imagines the non-Western can appear as additional examples and be folded into Western concepts; and again by a desire to distinguish canons.
Tatol’s latest essay for The Point calls for a nonconservative return to a wider sense of history, empowered by the archives of the internet:
What I am calling for is not ironic postmodern appropriations of art history that rely on a glib presentism, or an aesthetic traditionalism that fetishizes past art forms and dooms itself to producing cheap imitations of what came before. The rehistoricized artist, by contrast, remains contemporary while forging a relationship to history, a love of Shakespeare but also for Cao Xueqin, Michael Asher as well as Antonello da Messina, the anonymous creators of African masks and Romanesque capitals, Angkor Wat and Australian Aboriginal art, and Laozi and Montaigne, and Beethoven, and Pandit Pran Nath, and Buster Keaton and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and Marguerite Duras. This anatomy of influence, what was once hemmed in by the biased canons of Western art history, academia and national pride, is now an open field.
I hope it’s not too implausible to say this proposed wider field remains firmly within the limits of early 21st-century North American education. Cao Xueqin, especially after David Hawkes’s translation, is many Westerners’ go-to Chinese “novel.” Michael Asher, partly since Thomas Crow’s work and partly under the popular influence of Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, has become a standard example of rigorously anti-institutional postmodernism. Antonello da Messina has emerged unscathed from the first generations of modernist connoisseurs, from Bernard Berenson to Adrian Stokes, as a model of formalist purity avant la lettre. “Australian Aboriginal art” is a massive signifier that often signals the cultural distance of the writer. Together lists like this are like stamps in a passport: they date and identify the bearer and indicate their education and place in the world.
I know this sounds appalling. I hope it helps to say it applies to everyone, and it’s a reason I included my response to Henry Oliver. We all inherit and express our education. The trick is to not let it seem that this can be solved by actively mining the internet. We all remain safely within the folds of an awareness of history that nourishes ideas of quality, singularity, and any number of terms that come from the Enlightenment. It’s our task to try to puncture that envelope whenever possible, and one of the ways to do that is to call a halt to identifying value, taste and quality unless they are carefully scaffolded with historically specific, autobiographically reflective qualifications.
Read Sean Tatol’s original essay, “After the Post-Avant-Garde,” here, and click here to read his response to James Elkins. Stay tuned for further reflections from art critics, as well as Sean Tatol’s responses to them, in the coming weeks.
Far from “puncturing the envelope,” it seems to me that “calling a halt” to all judgments about quality and taste that do not make the requisite political throat-clearing would itself be a stifling envelope! None of us can directly access “quality” in art that is not mediated by culture and history and personal subjective response, that much is true. But brilliant works of art, and deep engagement with art, can still be achieved by attempting such an impossible feat. To forbid this would be more stifling than any overconfident notion of taste could ever be.