as the unholy alliance between modern art and the modern state—the
abstract message of the artwork has become more important than its
concrete texture as a painting, and works that flatter modern ideology
will automatically be praised and rewarded by the art establishment with
its links to the whole apparatus of the state.
IV
Nerdrum sees a connection between the chief characteristic on which
modern art prides itself—its abstraction—and the ideal of the autonomy
of art. Traditional art was heteronomous—it did not seek to serve purely
aesthetic purposes; it conceived of itself as serving the public, as pleas-
ing the public. Thus the traditional artist felt that he had to rely on the
beauty of his art, that he had to appeal to the senses of his public
(whether patrons or commercial customers). In short, the sensuous
beauty of traditional art reflected its lack of autonomy, its need to please
the public. In its attempt to be autonomous, modern art rejects the tradi-
tional ideal of sensuous beauty and tries to become ever more abstract.
As Nerdrum argues:
What first and foremost characterizes this art, in my mind, is the conquest
of the sensual expression, in favor of a philosophical purity, a purity that
finds its clearest and most consistent expression in conceptualism. Here it
has reached a philosophical level which makes it into a cool, clean expres-
sion of art, in sharp contrast to commercialism and sensuousness. (OK,
64–65)The modern work of art defines itself in terms of its concept, not its
beauty; it prides itself on what it is trying to accomplish qua work of art
and not on what it is trying to represent or express. That is why the mod-
ern work of art so often defines itself in negative terms: “this painting
does not use color to portray natural forms,” “this painting does not
employ traditional perspective,” “this painting does not try to depict
objects in three dimensions,” and so on. It sometimes seems, in practice
as well as theory, that for modernism the blank canvas becomes the ulti-
mate work of art because it does absolutely nothing that traditional art
prided itself on. As the logical conclusion of the impulse to abstract from
all appeals to the senses, the blank canvas becomes the ultimate embod-
iment of the ideal of the autonomy of art.
As we have seen, Nerdrum traces this new conception of art back to
Kant and his attempt in his Critique of Judgmentto establish aesthetics
The Importance of Being Odd 17