abstract art; its exuberant, sensual play of shape and color comes as close
to uninhibited lyricism as the last century could muster. Nonetheless, the
purity of the movement’s founding principles is sullied in its perform-
ance. The picturesque obscurities produced by many abstractionists are in
fact too sentimental and self-indulgent to justify the movement’s pro-
claimed Spartan aspirations. One might be tempted to parry an advo-
cate’s case with, “I’ve never much cared for pretty pictures.”
The absence of discernable meaning in abstract expressionism is mis-
leading since the void merely creates an opening for all the meanings
attributed by professional explicators. If anything, this branch of mod-
ern art is unbearably didactic because it must always be explained. The
theory that prompts the art becomes its meaning, and so, once again,
how you got there supplants where you’re going. Theory in art generates
lots of discussion but little belief: like a cheap toupee an artist can hide
beneath it and still fool no one. Theories also inevitably lead to rigidity:
a sententious dilettante like Clement Greenberg is a good example of the
shortcomings of theory-based perception. To say that representational
art, the most natural visual experience, is no longer viable simply
because it doesn’t fit into your philosophic scheme of history is worse
than ignorant; it’s impertinent. If there is a hell, one can only hope that
Clement Greenberg has found it.
As with all the artistic revolutions of modernism, there is something
distinctly middle-class in how the abstract expressionists strived to dis-
tinguish themselves through competition, creating a kind of elitism that
only comes from those wishing to be perceived as part of an elite. The
true elite, the privileged class, are characterized not by their ambition
but rather by an overweening presumptuousness: the hand holding the
scepter does so with limp familiarity. The prole tries to dazzle you with
the power of his mind while members of the upper class feel what
reveals their status most is character and taste (Joyce wants you to think
he’s the smartest man on earth, while Proust would have you believe he
was merely the most sensitive).
Abstraction is in many ways the ultimate middle class art because it’s
so safe; it can present itself as rebellious without the focus and risk of
specifics. This is the main reason abstract art is the preferred décor of
corporate America. An obscure configuration of hues hanging in a wait-
ing room even confers power: it signals that the man managing your
stock portfolio is privy to mysteries beyond your comprehension.
That sense of mystery is central to abstract expressionism as it is to
another important development in twentieth-century art, surrealism. In
surrealism, Dali and Company introduced an approach to art based on190 Geoffrey Bent