The modernist avant garde project fell apart for the same reason it had come into existence—an inevitable compulsion to challenge any and all authority. The opposition of artists and architects to industrial capitalism was based on the fiction of their possessing higher insight into the reality of modern times, and their assumption of the mantle of truthful cultural transformation from the business and political elites, their onetime patrons. Avant garde artists and architects had sought to become their own patrons, followers of their solo imaginations and magnetic dreamscapes. But, as the times wore on, it became apparent that there was no way to deny such insights to others. Inasmuch as the avant garde edifice was built upon the unique perceptions of the artist or architect, its goal was an emancipation of perception for everyone. This liberation had to be part of a broader liberation of humanity, one that in turn would submerge the avant garde.
The permanent youth rebellion begun in the 1950s in the United States (through such mass media rebels as James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley) contains at its core key notions of the avant garde and the bohemian. Later, in the civil rights and student movements and counterculture of the 1960s, opposition and rebellion became a mass phenomenon. Terms like “the establishment” or “the system” came to represent the “other” of popular avant gardism—the little boring man in a gray flannel suit, the cracker riding with a shotgun on a southern road. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, things became less black and white. Opposition began to point here, there, and everywhere. Amid the woman’s-, gay-, disabled-, elderly-, animal-, environmental-, and men’s-rights movements, insurrection was mainstreamed. It was not long afterward that it was commodified.
Over the past fifteen years, in an era when Marx and Malcolm are out of vogue and DeCaprio and Xena brushstroke the nation’s youth culture, big business is acutely aware that bohemian rumples and avant garde insurrection sells. A commercial for Miller Beer features shelled hipsters in a sub-normal, basketball suburbia grooving to the music of tasteless beer. The Gap tells us that since Kerouac and Cassidy wore khakis, their intoxications and ramblings can be zipped into ours. Nike advertises athletic shoes through juxtapositions of alienation and otherness that are the perverse legacy of Dali and Beuys. And Apple Computers, in the most famous television commercial of all time, acquired cyber-coolness by smashing the Goliath of big brother; somehow, if you use a Macintosh you will think differently.
But have industrialists gained the upper hand in the arts? Are the art and architectural worlds now led by the titans of Disney, IBM, and McDonalds? Are billionaires like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates commissioning cutting-edge works of architecture? With few exceptions, the answer is no. Corporate sponsorship of the arts has not replaced the one-to-one relationship between patron and artist that existed before the avant garde rebellion. That earlier relationship had created an urbane and humanistic culture in the West, a set of works of art and architecture that were able to represent their societies precisely because those societies were more homogeneous, hierarchical, and far less pluralistic. Current arts and architectural patrons generally have much narrower ambitions and much more complex scenarios to contend with: including the rainbow of people excluded from the earlier white-male embrace of patron and artist.
Today, patrons like the Medici or even the Carnegies are rare, almost impossible. Business decisions are no longer the product of a single voice or family, one working long-term in the same place to produce a consistent product. Patrons in that old sense had sought immortality in beautiful art and redemption through majestic works of architecture. Old style mercantile and later industrial patronage implied an admission of guilt in contributing to society’s problems and a large measure of responsibility for fixing them. By contrast, today’s service- and information-oriented economy admits no guilt and takes scant responsibility. The buzz from these industries is superficial hipness. Since companies seek almost nothing but profits and utility, why would they deeply invest in beauty and pleasure? Contemporary business looks at art from the point of view of sponsorship, not patronage. Companies are interested in how architecture and art can help sales, and yet what sells is determined most by market research. The visual arts are icing on a greenback cake.
The idea of either patron or artist as guide to society’s future is anachronistic. Neither has the upper hand in dictating the nature of reality. Both are caught alike in a web of opposition and rebellion. It’s almost as if art and architecture have entered a neo-Middle Ages.
Alongside the commodification of avant garde rebellion and the transformation of patronage into sponsorship is a repudiation of avant garde creation, privilege, and freedom. Within the art and architectural worlds, the now-historical avant garde has been attacked as institution. Outside, artists and architects are opposed by the emergence of a curious anti-avant garde—the critical public, composed of hypersensitive viewers, over-users, nosy neighbors, all-too-special interest groups, and endlessly-proliferating lawyers. A century of celebration of marginality has opened the gates for an assault from the margins. The promotion of excess has invoked excessive intervention into the works of artists and architects. Avant garde opposition to middle-class entitlement has become public opposition against any and all privilege, including that of artistic and architectural experiment.
Nowadays, bold and radical plans are suspect. Grand designs to refashion urban movement, audacious sculptures to reconceive public space, and all manner of artistic schemes to reorient or disorient perception are combatted and squelched by coalitions whose unity is based on mortared oppositional consciousness. In a world where everyone’s a potential patron or artist, critical avant garde concepts like progress and originality are upended 180 degrees. The new tired buzzwords are context, convention, and community. The anti-patron has arrived.
Anti-patrons do not generally commission art or architecture. Instead, they throw design guidelines and lawsuits in the path of change. For a new museum to get built, for a bridge to be designed, or for an outdoor sculpture to be installed, it must run a steeplechase of interest groups and weightless bureaucracies. Art and architecture are subject to review and redesign by committees, public meetings, as well as opinion polls. The nation’s patron, the National Endowment for the Arts, is more famous for the attacks mounted against radical art than for its paltry financial support of art. Even at the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, epitome of old-time patronage, neighborhood groups forced changes in building massing and the color of cladding materials. Why should the reflected glare of art ruin anyone’s afternoon at the backyard swimming pool?
Over the past quarter-century, the once self-contained relationship of artist and patron has been riven by pluralistic and confrontational cross currents. The arts are understood less as a foundation or critique of reality than as an immersion within reality’s fractured existence and polarizing eccentricities. Thus, while visual artists no longer represent dominant societal interests, as they did during the great age of artistic patronage, they can no longer claim exclusivity in confronting those interests. It’s hard to be spectacularly oppositional when the numbed gloss of combat holds court on the Jerry Springer show and the Kenneth Starr inquisition.
Who, then, has an oppositional voice today? Can critical insights be heard in a sea of shouting individuals? Are avant garde movements passé? Must art and architecture find new directions, apart from the accomplice of patrons or the antagonism of the avant gardes?
A future that seems inescapable is ongoing artistic confrontation with mass society. But because the arts can no longer be detached from overall cultural production, because artists and architects are knotted with sponsors and critics and viewers, this confrontation will be different from those of the past. It will not be a pure, heroic struggle for utopia. Instead, it will take place increasingly on a flat, cliché-ridden terrain, one that is less metaphysical landscape than meta-textual media-scape. After all, the earlier axes between artist and patron or artist vs. society have multiplied into swarming vectors. The world is gray and stained. The ragged constellations of the mass consumer and culture industry are now the insufferable yet inseparable relationship for art and architecture.
In Early Modern Europe, in the epoch of patronage, the visual arts became an open system, a set of journeys toward beauty reasoned atop a changing world. Later, in the age of the avant garde, the traces of this system released other trajectories that obliterated their own foundations and contours as they exploded toward new insights. For the future, it would be naive to think that anyone could turn down the heat generated by centuries of such activity. Enmeshed in the diversity and contradiction that are the postmodern condition, art and architecture are perpetually boiling over, regardless of who pays the heating bill.
Author Mitchell Schwarzer, PhD, is the author of German Architectural Theory (1995), Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (2004), Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: History and Guide (2007), and the upcoming Home Egonomics: America’s Obsession with Real Estate. He is Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2007 in arcCA 07.2, “Design Review.”
