Contemporary American Art: Creativity Without A Cause
R. R. Reno reviews the Whitney Museum’s Biennial Exhibition of contemporary American art here at First Things. I must admit that I would be among Reno’s friends who would make “faces when I told them that I wanted to take a look.” I agree with Reno’s characterization of much of “contemporary art” as…
… a synonym for the radical chic that has become a cliché: chocolate-smeared performance artists, piles of trash in the corners of rooms, ideological pronouncements spray-painted onto police barriers, and so forth.
Most of Reno’s critique is not exactly glowing, yet he is fair and open-minded. His overall assessment of the exhibtion reminds me of Francis Schaeffer’s perceptive evaluation of art through the ages. There seems to be no overarching guiding philosophy behind contemporary American art. He states:
All the same, the message this year was clear: There is no settled orthodoxy in contemporary American art. There’s no there there.
Artists, as canaries in culture, provide insight into the moral and philosophical status of our modern culture. Forsaking the firm foundation of Christian Theism and realizing the inability of reason alone to provide meaning, humanity is left without meaning, direction, coherence, or cause. Reno concludes:
At this moment, the canaries at the Whitney testify to an emerging situation: creativity without a cause…Yet, as I walked on, my hope was mixed with anxiety. Culture cannot exist without orthodoxies, because freedom cannot give itself the obligations necessary for its own perfection: the ordered liberty of assent to that which is greater. Creative freedom we seem to have, but for what and toward what? The same question holds for intellectual, moral, and political freedom. It is one thing to be free from the false dogmas of the modern avant-garde; it is another to find the true dogmas that humanize. For the sake of our creative culture now freeing itself from the long reigning pieties of the modern avant-garde—and for our culture more broadly—I hope God sees fit to open some new eyes to see old truths.