OLD NEWS

AMERICAN ART HISTORY FROM A TO Z by
Emily Watlington, Barry Schwabsky, Eva Díaz, Adrian Piper, Andy Battaglia, Cambra Sklarz, Alison Burstein, Natalie Dykstra, Kelly Presutti, Andrea Fraser, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Caroline A. Jones, Kirsten Swenson, Terry Smith, Marvin Heiferman, Sara Raza, Jackson Arn, Glenn Adamson, Kate Wagner, Isabella Shey Robbins, Nicholas and Michael Shapiro, Andrew Lampert, J. Hoberman, John P. Murphy, TK Smith, Josh T Franco
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When Art in America was founded in 1913, it was an important year for American art. The inaugural Armory Show introduced the European avant-garde to the United States, galvanizing generations of artists while shocking audiences with paintings like Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). By 1917, Duchamp even-more-famously caused a stir with his porcelain urinal Fountain, a work that changed art forever and helped make New York an artistic center. American art’s enduring paradoxes were already on display. That iconic readymade—now an emblem of the anything-goes American avant-garde—had been created by a foreigner who would soon establish tighter ties with New York, blurring the boundaries of what constituted “American” art. And the first Armory Show took place in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, a building with connections to American militarism that has since hosted everything from a homeless shelter to a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. Something undeniably new and electric was developing, but it was also linked to violence and supported, in part, by weapons profiteering. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we look back on the history of American art. Anniversaries are not always celebrations—they can commemorate love, loss, and everything in between—but they do offer moments for reflection. Rather than presenting a single master narrative about this country of many cultures and contradictions, we invited esteemed contributors to write the history of American art through some of the terms that helped define it, arranged here from A to Z. At a moment when the Trump administration has proposed such absurd commemorative gestures as a national sculpture garden of selectively chosen “American heroes” or an “Arc de Trump,” we felt it was worth exploring other aspects of the story. (And there are many more still: We devoted “H” to the Hudson River School, but it could just as easily have been the Harlem Renaissance; “S” is for Sovereignty, but the Shakers would have worked well too.) The entries that follow aim to capture American art in its complexity, though certainly not its entirety, and range from utopian experiments and formal innovations to protests and refusals. Zadie Smith put the stakes of projects like this one best when she wrote that “historical nostalgia should not be the sole preserve of the right. The left can also make use of it. We can remind ourselves that a more just society is possible, if only because a few of the necessary conditions have at various moments actually existed on this earth, and in the not-so-distant past.”
To be a student of history means to learn from the good and the bad. With American museums, public schools, and universities under unprecedented scrutiny, we continue to fight for that nuance all we can. —Emily Watlington
A – Abstract Expressionism
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Somehow the label Abstract Expressionism won out over “action painting,” “American-type painting,” “the New York School,” and who knows what others, probably because of the name’s reassuring suggestion that it referred to a movement, an “ism” like those of the early 20th century—Futurism, Cubism, and so on. But it wasn’t. Could, say, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman ever have fit in the same box? What united them and all their colleagues (Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the rest) was simply the feeling that, for the first time in the United States, artists were working at a center of creative energy rather than following from a distance; they no longer had to declare, as Arshile Gorky once had, “If Picasso drips, I drip.”
The so-called Abstract Expressionists were a group of people, but what they had in common was not Abstract Expressionism but a shared feeling of being at a point of possibility that they themselves were creating. “There is no style of painting now,” insisted de Kooning. But a certain fear haunted him and his contemporaries: that they might find a style and become its prisoners—that their art would become academic, an easily reproducible trope. Hence the many changes of direction by de Kooning and Pollock, Philip Guston’s abandonment of abstraction, Jack Tworkov’s search for a clearer geometric structure, even Rothko’s shift from radiant chroma to murky browns and grays. They all sought what Rothko called “unknown adventures in an unknown space,” and all felt more or less anxious, experiencing a “perpetual irritability,” as de Kooning described it, as soon as they found themselves in “a situation of comfort.”
That anxiety, that discomfort, is the glory of the Abstract Expressionists, and it’s what makes their art feel so distant from us today. A succeeding generation, led by the Pop artists, among others, found it more realistic—more honest—to situate art not in an unknown space but in the space we all inhabit most of the time, that of consumer culture and its multitude of products. Art could be a product about all the other products, and just as reproducible. That Pop idea in turn became academic; but no one got very anxious about it. Too bad. Couldn’t we use a little of the Abstract Expressionists’ midcentury irritability again? Wouldn’t we benefit from that determination to go through the unknown in search of the new? —Barry Schwabsky
B – Black Mountain College
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Black Mountain College endures in the small but exceptional canon of profoundly unconventional places in America, sites in the cultural imagination where radical artistic innovation and vanguard social communitarianism fostered alternative visions of what creative, progressive, democratic culture can be. If the college, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, from 1933 to 1957, was a “galaxy of talent,” to cite former student Ray Johnson’s semi-ironic description, it was also characterized by both bitter dispute and moments of evanescent harmony. The rigorous artistic practices and influential teaching methods that emerged at Black Mountain made it a home for crucial transatlantic dialogue between European modernist aesthetics and pedagogy and their postwar American counterparts.
Experimentation—and its close relative, interdisciplinarity—were key themes of this conversation. Seemingly everyone who attended Black Mountain College shared a desire to experiment, but they didn’t necessarily agree on what that meant. In particular, competing approaches to experimentation were advanced by three of the college’s most notable faculty members in its heyday: artist Josef Albers, composer John Cage, and architect-designer R. Buckminster Fuller. The models they explored—the creation of new forms of visual experience using methods of laboratory-like study imported from the Bauhaus (Albers); the organization of aleatory processes and acceptance of indeterminacy inspired by the Dadaists (Cage); and “comprehensive, anticipatory design science” in the service of a utopia of efficiently managed resources (Fuller)—were represented in projects as varied as geometric abstraction, serial and mass production, dome architecture, chance-based musical composition, and explorations of monochromatic painting. These types of “testing” were fostered by other Black Mountain luminaries such as Anni Albers and Merce Cunningham, as well as students including Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Kenneth Snelson, and Cy Twombly. What drew such disparate figures together was a shared sense of countercultural ambition and an allegiance to avant-gardism, cultural improvement, and political progressiveness. Black Mountain’s reputation for experimentation made it a touchstone in contemporary art and culture whose influence remains vital today. As does the importance of its aspirations in the fraught history of 20th and 21st-century art. After all, artists may not experiment so intensively if they perceive their current state of affairs as satisfactory. —Eva Díaz
C – Conceptual Art
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Sol LeWitt’s groundbreaking text “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” is generally acknowledged to have launched Conceptual art as an identifiable movement. But that text was the culmination of many crosscurrents within New York avant-garde art in the mid-to-late 1960s. It was provoked partly in counterpoint to Donald Judd’s essay “Specific Objects” and by the environment of ongoing dialectic among New York Minimalists, such as LeWitt, Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris; as well as by the transmutations of that dialectic among their colleagues, including Mel Bochner, Lee Lozano, Gene Beery, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and Dorothea Rockburne (and myself). LeWitt’s celebrated dinners were the intellectual crucible in which this new art of ideas was being forged.
Seth Siegelaub’s “January 1969” show built on this foundation by showcasing the work of four of those colleagues whose embrace of conceptual abstraction aimed to distance them entirely from material form: Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, and Doug Huebler. In the early 1970s, Kosuth’s dialogue with the Art-Language group in England and Australia then refined that development into an exclusive focus on language and denotation. Simultaneously, LeWitt’s dialogues with California Conceptualists like John Baldessari, Charles Gaines, and David and Eleanor Antin; and with European artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Bernd and Hilla Becher established an inclusive vision of Conceptual art that reached across the American continent and across the Atlantic.
According to this vision, Conceptual art is distinguished by the artist’s central preoccupation with the concepts and ideas that inspire and inform the work, rather than with the exploration of its materials. This preoccupation itself determines the most suitable material form in which its concepts are realized. Its physical form can and often does include language, whether written, spoken, or performed, as a particularly effective means of expressing or denoting concepts. Conceptual art in this view valorizes clarity and simplicity of form as a conduit for depth and power of conceptual content.
This view subordinates the choice of form and materials in a work to the realization of its conceptual content as clearly and effectively as possible. The priority of a work’s conceptual content over its material form necessitates greater attention to the quality and significance of that conceptual content, and greater receptivity to the variety of material forms available in which to realize it. Extending the limits of conceptual content to include political and social critique means extending the limits of material form to include the multiplicity of new genres and media that most effectively communicates that content. This multimedia profusion of trenchant social critique in contemporary art is Conceptual art’s legacy to Neoconceptualists of the late 1970s, such as Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Lawler; and to their progeny in the 1980s, including Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Sherrie Levine, and Ross Bleckner. It continues to ramify to this day. —Adrian Piper
D – Dia Art Foundation
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Over the past half century, the Dia Art Foundation has grown from a mysterious Lower Manhattan clique that moved big money into Minimalism to a venerable institution with global allure. In 1972, a German gallerist who made his way into the SoHo scene (Heiner Friedrich) traveled to Texas and convened a meeting of minds when he connected with an heiress from a family of oil-rich art collectors (Philippa de Menil) and an art historian who had been mentored by Philippa’s illustrious mother, Dominique de Menil (Helen Winkler Fosdick). Together, the three principals founded Dia in 1974 and went to work to foster a kind of American artistic patronage in the mold of the Medicis in 15th-century Florence.
Flush with money from Philippa’s family fortune, Dia—with a name alluding to the Greek word for “through”—pledged career-changing support to artists like Donald Judd (whose move to Marfa, Texas, was seeded by Dia), Walter De Maria (who, with the foundation’s help, created his 1977 masterwork The Lightning Field in the desert of New Mexico), and Dan Flavin (who converted a former firehouse and church acquired by Dia to a sanctuary for his fluorescent-light sculptures in 1983). These were places for pilgrimage, to be visited and revisited like European chapels adorned with frescoes by Giotto or stained glass by Henri Matisse. Other artists realized works of similarly grand scale, like La Monte Young’s epic Dream House (1979–85) sound installation in the former New York Mercantile Exchange and the Fred Sandback Museum (1981–96) in a former bank in Massachusetts. After an oil glut gutted the economy in the early 1980s, however, Dia seemed to be done—overleveraged to a degree that left artists high and dry. But following a leadership change and a period of financial restabilization, Dia firmed up its commitments to maintaining certain early projects and, in 1987, opened the four-story Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, at the time a postindustrial neighborhood still several years away from becoming New York’s premier gallery district. Then, in 2003, the foundation opened an even bigger space befitting the artists it supported: Dia Beacon, in a massive former factory in upstate New York.
In its destination museum and its recently renovated exhibition space in Chelsea, Dia has devoted the past decade or so to expanding its purview to women and artists of color who worked alongside the white male artists the foundation originally funded but who had initially been overlooked. Recent acquisitions and long-term exhibitions have featured Ann Truitt, Sam Gilliam, Charlotte Posenenske, Senga Nengudi, and Steve McQueen. The foundation is also offering that same support to a new generation working in Minimalist-ish modes toward decidedly different ends—as with Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018), a one-acre piece of land on a former plantation site in South Carolina that the artist purchased and loaned to Dia to steward into the future. —Andy Battaglia
E – Emancipation
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While the term “emancipation” can refer to several means by which enslaved people obtained their freedom, in US history it is emphatically associated with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In the watershed document, which took effect on January 1, 1863, Lincoln fulfilled the pledge of his earlier, preliminary proclamation that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free …” The document also formally allowed previously enslaved and other Black recruits to join the Union’s military, providing critical power to the Civil War effort. It was an imperfect and incomplete act—slavery would not be abolished in the United States until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. But the Emancipation Proclamation nevertheless shifted perceptions about the ongoing war and brought immense joy to countless communities as 1862 became 1863.
In the immediate aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, several artists tried to distill the occasion into something to see. William Tolman Carlton relied on the drama of anticipation on the eve of freedom (Watch Meeting—Dec. 31st, 1862—Waiting for the Hour, 1863). Thomas Nast idealized life after emancipation with a narrative of slavery that ends with a scene of a liberated family in a state of domestic bliss (The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863—The Past and the Future, 1863). Sculptors John Quincy Adams Ward (The Freedman, 1863) and later Edmonia Lewis (Forever Free, 1867) turned to the heroic forms of seminude male figures breaking the chains that bound them. But perhaps it is a scene by Civil War artist Alfred Waud that best suggests some of the harsher realities of emancipation. His work Contrabands Coming into Camp in Consequence of the Proclamation (1863) avoids the tendency to aggrandize the occasion in favor of a grittier depiction. Translated from photograph to drawing to magazine illustration, this view shows a shabby mule-drawn wagon overflowing with newly free people who have traveled to Union territory for the promise of liberation. The picture prompts the question: After emancipation, what comes next? Published in Harper’s Weekly on January 31, 1863, along with commentary by Waud, the illustration exemplifies the way audiences saw and consumed so much news of the Civil War. Symbolically, it represents the long, difficult path to emancipation, and foreshadows the ongoing journey toward true freedom that would stretch well beyond the Civil War and into the present. —Cambra Sklarz
F – Fluxus
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More than 60 years after its emergence, there is no consensus on how to define Fluxus; participants and commentators continue to propose an ever-growing array of accounts. This multiplicity can be disorienting, evidence that Fluxus is, to borrow artist Ben Vautier’s phrase, “a pain in art’s ass.” But it is also fitting, analogous to the limitless possibilities for interpreting the open-ended, text-based instructions for performance known as “event scores” at the heart of Fluxus activities.
When describing Fluxus in the context of American art history, questions of who took part and where are essential. Fluxus grew out of experiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s that artists from around the world staged to stretch art’s boundaries, disciplines, and forms. Key figures in this proto-Fluxus period include Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, and La Monte Young. As many of these artists traveled and worked between cities, hubs of experimentation emerged in parallel in the US, Germany, and Japan. After learning about practices by these and other like-minded artists, Lithuanian-American graphic designer George Maciunas, then living in New York, conceived a way to present their work together within a collective framework, which he coined “Fluxus.” By 1962, the group had begun putting on concerts and circulating publications and editions around the globe. Fluxus artists also unsettled the premise of art’s national affiliations. According to Fluxus associate Ken Friedman, these artists responded to a midcentury cultural landscape that was separated into two modes of art making: one “public, heroic, and national in inclination,” another “antinationalistic in sentiment and tone and practiced by artists who are not easily used as national flag-bearers.” Fluxus affiliates fell firmly in the latter. Art historian Hannah Higgins has described how artists harnessed this transnationalism as both subject and material, charting their own forms of “Fluxus geography.” Emblematic is Shiomi’s Spatial Poem No. 1 (1965), one of a series of scores mailed to an international list of Fluxus contacts. On a map, Shiomi pinned flags with descriptions of how the recipients realized the score at their respective sites of enactment. The work makes concrete the relationship between Fluxus’s transnational reach and a score’s ability to unfold widely and endlessly, generating interpretations that reflect a diversity of perspectives and practices. Accordingly, Spatial Poem No. 1 offers a model for understanding essential characteristics of Fluxus’s composition and outputs, “present[ing] a fantastic panorama of human attitudes,” as Shiomi put it. —Alison Burstein
G – Gilded Age
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The exuberant and fractious era, which was given its moniker by Mark Twain’s 1873 eponymous novel, is often characterized by the glittery facades of growing wealth and privilege. But facades they were, obscuring vast divides between the haves and have-nots, business and labor, urban and rural populations. Whizzy technological innovations and a rush of immigrants powered social and economic changes, even as Jim Crow laws codified racist segregation and violence. Also during this time, more Americans saw more art—both imported from abroad and domestic-made—than at any time since the founding of the Republic. The reasons were many: Robber-baron collectors, like Henry Clay Frick and J.P. Morgan, had boundless fortunes to spend; large, comprehensive art museums opened their doors for the first time; a rising middle class,eager for leisure and art education, spurred an increase in travel, art schools, clubs, and galleries. To be cosmopolitan in a country rapidly rising in economic and political power required a fluency in fine art; and as Darwinism displaced old-time religion, beauty itself came to be a spiritual pursuit and balm.
“One good thing about 19th-century American painting,” John Updike once remarked, “is that there is a lot of it.” From Winslow Homer’s seascapes to Thomas Eakins’s portraits of neurasthenic figures undone by rapid change, to the domestic spaces of Mary Cassatt and the silky silks of John Singer Sargent’s tour de force canvases, the years after the Civil War saw a rush of artmaking, with many artists steamboating to Paris, the world’s cultural capital, for their education and to burnish their credentials. Where some artists delved into the era’s resplendence, others revealed how the Gilded Age was also the broken age. Robert Henri’s Ashcan painters conveyed both the energy of rapid industrialization—towering buildings, busy streets, crowded restaurants—and its terrible costs. Jacob Riis’s photographs of poor urban families were a visual rebuke to Carnegie’s blast furnaces. Frederic Remington’s Moonlight, Wolf (ca. 1909) pictures a predator standing in a barren landscape, alone, its eyes glistening with the light of the night stars, which seems to pose a question near the end of an era: What, then, has progress wrought? —Natalie Dykstra
H – Hudson River School
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There was never a “school” per se in the Hudson River Valley, but the area’s natural beauty—and investment potential—did draw a number of painters to the region just north of New York City. Foremost among them was Thomas Cole (1801–1848), who created a defining vision for the American landscape based in sweeping, elevated perspectives. Cole relished the wide-open possibilities of the valley views, endowing the landscape with a moral quality. For Cole, there was “an almost inseparable connection between the beautiful and the good.” Like many things that are great about America, the Hudson River School was largely the product of immigrants. Cole himself came from England, where he had fought for workers’ rights in the face of increasing industrialization. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), another artist affiliated with the movement, arrived from Germany. And the list goes on. That such artists’ perspectives eventually became associated with the expansionist policies of Manifest Destiny is one of the cruel ironies of American history. Cole warned against such greed and the increasing “ravages of the axe” in his series The Course of Empire (1833–36), a set of five allegorical paintings that track the expansion and dissolution of an imagined empire.
Cole’s only official student was Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), who shared his teacher’s affinity for soaring vistas. After making his name with a grand tableau of Niagara Falls in 1857, Church traveled extensively in South America in search of ever-more striking sights—a sign that the Hudson River was but one point of departure for artists in landscape painting’s thrall. Church did, however, return to the Hudson and transformed a 250-acre property into a sublime estate known as Olana, which can be visited today. It’s a testament to the legacy of the Hudson River School, which established America as a land of unending possibility grown out of its vast and sprawling environs. —Kelly Presutti
I – Institutional Critique
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Institutional critique is an approach to art making that emerged with conceptual art in the late 1960s. While the term itself was first used in the 1970s, it was, arguably, developed and put into wider circulation by artists and critics affiliated with the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York in the 1980s. Institutional critique is sometimes characterized as art about museums. However, careful consideration of the art and artists associated with institutional critique reveals a broader scope: art that critically engages the institution, or field, of art as a whole, including the role of art and artists within it. In this sense, institutional critique rejects the historical avant-garde opposition between radical artist and bourgeois art institution, recognizing that artists themselves are a fundamental, constitutive, and often conservative institution in the field of art. This recognition has led some artists associated with institutional critique to develop a critique of artistic practice itself and to reject studio-based art making. Similarly, these artists reject the avant-garde aim to dismantle or escape institutions of art, recognizing that avant-garde art itself is defined by those institutions whose boundaries it endeavors to escape. With this understanding, institutional critique can be defined less by its subject matter than by the methodology of reflexive critique, often rooted in rigorous research and realized through critical interventions in specific sites and situations. This methodology of reflexive and site-specific critique has been criticized as contradictory, complicit, and readily co-opted. Artists associated with institutional critique reject such criticism as figments of a mythology of artistic radicality that is itself deeply institutionalized. They recognize the failure of avant-garde art to realize its radical aims and examine the contradictory character of the anti-institutional ideology espoused by so many artists, who spend their lives pursuing institutional recognition. Institutional critique demands that artists reflect honestly on their own investments in the field of art and the compromises and capitulation required to function within it. It challenges artists to recognize those investments and the various interests they serve. It calls on artists to consider what kind of institutions they deal with, and what kind of institutions they are striving to function within. —Andrea Fraser
J – Jazz
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No articulation of American modernism could be sustained without jazz. Born from the Black experience and long considered America’s original art form, jazz continues to inform the musical styles that came before and after, as all are subsumed within its ever-expanding orb. From spirituals and blues to funk and soul, jazz absorbs, digests, and regurgitates modalities of rhythm, bending notes that explode with jubilation, meander with deep curiosity, or slump in deep sorrow. Jazz is the articulation of what Arthur Jafa has described as the “immaterial innovation” of Black folks. It is immeasurable and uncontained, nonlinear and elliptical. Like the contagion called Jes Grew that spreads across the land in Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, jazz is a bewitching virus that overtakes not only bodies but whole cultures, infusing them with distinct and unmistakable inferences of the Black experience. Jazz is America coming to terms with itself, loving the totality of its original sin. Jazz achieves a catharsis that allows it to break free from the constraints of European convention, to explore the edges of line and form. When jazz materializes in the paintings of Stuart Davis, Archibald Motley, Jackson Pollock, and Romare Bearden, viewers feel the echoes of sound, the call-and-response of musicians who disentangle notes from a crowded page, assigning each a signature. Ensembles fracture and then piece together melodies like the quilts of Gee’s Bend. There is no mistaking jazz as a modernism deeply rooted in the red earth of the South—the backyard of America. With its triangulation of native sons—Jack Whitten, Sun Ra, and Thornton Dial—the state of Alabama alone holds one of the many keys that unlock a power that is stronger than itself: ancestral, ancient, and ever-evolving. Jazz lives in the surrealism of Ted Joans, who extolls it as a new religion. More contemporarily, jazz embedded in the work of artists like Jennie C. Jones, Torkwase Dyson, and Jason Moran serves to echo spatial notation in space or on the page. Jazz resonates in the frenetic visual phrasing of Arthur Jafa’s films, Glenn Ligon’s syncopated neons, and the quietude of Sam Gilliam’s drapes. And sound and image are inextricably linked in the photography of Roy DeCarava, who early on saw jazz echoing the past and trumpeting the future. —Valerie Cassel Oliver K – Kitsch
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Because Americans had no such word in the 1920s, we took “kitsch” from German. Kitsch is complex, but surely designates something embarrassing. From there the precise aesthetics fork: Is the thing sweetly sentimental? (Nineteenth-century illustrated postcards.) Does it have a distinct connotation of the “ersatz” (another great German word for “fake”)? Or is this kitsch ugly and unrefined? In all these possible definitions, kitsch is definitively lower class. That much was explicit in Clement Greenberg’s classic 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Mentioning popular tunes (“Tin Pan Alley”), greeting card poems (“Eddie Guest”), and battle paintings (misattributed to Russian realist painter Ilya Repin), Greenberg contrasted these popular forms with the “difficult” art of avant-garde modernism (such as poetry by T.S. Eliot or Picasso’s Cubism). Although found in the same temporal frame, the kitsch objects come from an earlier time: They are the degraded and cheapened echoes of abandoned high art. Greenberg was then a Trotskyite, putting his finger on what Walter Benjamin was also analyzing as the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. A melody might begin in courtly European society, but once you get the player piano and the wax cylinder, the centuries-old derivative music is no longer innovative. Theodor Adorno would join this criticism: Kitsch objects lose any capacity to push culture forward, aesthetically speaking. In contrast, avant-garde art (per Greenberg) both has “a superior consciousness of history” and participates in the “advanced intellectual conscience” of revolutionary thought in European societies. Kitsch calls up “vicarious experience and faked sensations” generated by a form of capitalism that welcomes and cultivates “insensibility.” This contrasts with what Greenberg was grappling with: European and American modernism at Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 and An American Place. Greenberg’s critique of kitsch certainly took hold, generating postmodern artists who style their works as self-aware and hence avant-garde kitsch (e.g., Jeff Koons), as well as NFT producers who parade their defiance of an artworld elite in offering collectible tokens (e.g., Beeple). The statue of Elon Musk commissioned for the crypto coin Elon Goat Token ($EGT) is a veritable chimera of kitsch: a decently representational portrait bust by self-described “metal sculptors” Kevin and Michelle Stone, welded to an awkwardly engineered “goat” body in turn attached to a rocket, all of it bolted to a semi-trailer. More could be said about this unique Greatest Of All Time sculpture, but it is enough to observe that we are no longer receiving degraded echoes of the kind of art objects Greenberg mourned. We are in total ignorance of art, innocent of centuries of artists and collectors who jointly cherished a well-worked-out Greek morphology of human-animal meldings, where pagan man-goats’ priapic powers (as Bacchic demigods and satyrs) did not need fossil fuel and mechanical hydraulics to get it up. —Caroline A. Jones
L – Land Art
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American Land art can be defined expansively—Indigenous cultures have built effigy mounds on the North American continent for millennia—or narrowly, as the movement led by a small group of New York–based artists beginning in the late 1960s. In the catalog for their 2012 survey “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974,” curators Miwon Kwon and Philipp Kaiser characterized the latter approach to Land art as “permanent monumental sculptures in remote, inhospitable locations that ostensibly escape the art system and demand reverential pilgrimages to experience them in situ.” Just over a decade ago, “Ends of the Earth” disrupted this narrative to reveal Land art as a global, media-dependent practice. Magazine spreads featured the dynamited trenches of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), the bulldozed rocks of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), and the grid of steel poles comprising Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), as well as the concrete pipes of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1974–77).
These projects evoked infrastructure—jetties, culverts, the electrical grid—and were made with earth-moving equipment, explosives, and industrial materials. But in recent years, this era of Land art has come into focus as colonialist and ecocidal. As artist Raven Chacon (Diné) has said, “[T]hose guys from the 1960s … tried to destroy the land and to colonize different places that they felt were theirs.”
Starting in the late 1970s, Land art became a catalyst for many other forms. It could be ephemeral, as in Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body works,” which realized brief siluetas in mud and smoke. It could be urban, becoming landscape architecture in Mary Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989–96, demolished in 2025) or Holt’s Dark Star Park (1979–84). It could be rehabilitative, as in sites reclaimed by Harriet Feigenbaum, Robert Morris, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
More recently, Land art has taken the form of ceremonial events rooted in social practice and community-building. Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence (2015) was a row of 26 helium balloons, 10 feet in diameter, that crossed the US–Mexico border in a symbolic act of undoing or “suturing” this geopolitical divide. In Las Vegas, Fawn Douglas (Southern Paiute) and Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) conducted Transformance (2021), a procession to a long-closed public park that was ceremonially reopened in an act of rematriation, symbolically returning land to Indigenous women for care and embodied connection to the Earth. In critic Lucy Lippard’s words, “If someone does something kind of marvelous and it’s in the land, call it Land art.” Whatever forms it takes, Land art is an expression of human relationships to the Earth we all inhabit. —Kirsten Swenson
M – MoMA
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“You can be a museum, or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.” According to the recollection of John B. Hightower, former longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this was Gertrude Stein’s response when Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s first director, outlined plans for the new institution. Stein identified what turned out to be an enabling contradiction in the early years, one that has come to unsettle the institution in recent decades.
Founded in 1929 by donors Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, MoMA received official endorsement by the City of New York on the condition that it focus on public education and, like European musées de passage such as the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris, display its acquisitions for five years, then deaccession them—by sale, gift, or exchange, or by transferring them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By obliging itself to prioritize remaining modern, it functioned much like contemporary art spaces do today. But not for long. The value of the museum’s holdings grew so quickly and became so identified with the institution in the minds of visitors, that, in 1953, these arrangements ceased. Perhaps the major factor, however, was that MoMA became the place where modern art—along with the other arts, fashion, and taste aligned with it—was explored in the most depth, articulated by its practitioners and interpreters, and defined for increasingly interested publics. It became not only the leading museum of its kind in the world, but the museum of modern art per se.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, a clear sense of modern art’s historic mission was projected. Major shows traced the evolution of key art movements, notably abstract art, Cubism, and Surrealism; of modern masters, above all Picasso; of modern architecture, especially the International Style; and of design, including Machine Design. American painting in its triumphal phase was enthusiastically embraced. Compelling exhibitions, major publications, well-wrought arguments, aided not least by the coherence of its in-house design, all had a major impact on visitors, readers, artists, and other similar institutions worldwide. In a phrase, modern art became MoMA modernism. By the 1970s, however, the overlooking of artists of diverse genders, races, and nationalities had come to seem like what it was: systemic exclusion. Protests erupted, and alternative spaces, such as the New Museum, were founded to fill these gaps. Meanwhile, MoMA focused on growing its collections and expanding its footprint, with major renovations in 1984, 2004, and 2019. Outsourcing the most happening art to its PS1 location in Queens, the Midtown museum remained committed to the idea that contemporary art is, fundamentally, an updating of the complex dynamics of modern art, so MoMA needed to show only the recent and current art that fit this bill. The seemingly endless variety of mediums within which contemporary artists work, the multiplicitous character of art being made now all over the world, and its immersion in contemporary concerns rather than modernizing narratives, tells a different story. Meanwhile, MoMA remains a museum of modern art, as its medium-specific departments, and curatorial structure, attests. —Terry Smith
_ArtInAmerica