ket, they would only be damning themselves. When it comes to finan-
cial support, modernists have truly enjoyed the best of all possible
worlds, often drawing upon patronage, the commercial market, and gov-
ernment funding all at once. The idea of the starving modernist artist is
the great cultural myth of our time. The twentieth century supported
more artists and at higher levels of financial reward than all the rest of
human history combined, and chiefly through the private art market.^24
Nerdrum could in fact rewrite the history of modern art from an anti-
modernist perspective. To the extent that modern artists have relied on
private funding, they have retained their vitality by maintaining a vital
link to an audience; to the extent that they have turned to public fund-
ing, they have cut themselves off from the true public and lost their way
in a wilderness of abstraction and pretentious and empty conceptualism.
V
I have dwelled at length on Nerdrum’s writings on art in order to show
that, despite his rejection of conceptualism in the practice of painting, he
is a sophisticated conceptual thinker himself. He has thought long and
hard about the history of art, and condemns modernism, not out of igno-
rance of its theoretical underpinnings, but precisely out of a profound
engagement with them. Anyone who has read and genuinely understood
Kant’s Critique of Judgmenthas established his credentials to talk about
aesthetics.^25 But the more interesting question remains: does Nerdrum’s
critique of modernism somehow operate in his paintings themselves?
Given how mysterious they are, and how elusive their meaning seems to
be, I hesitate to read any message out of them.^26 But I will offer this ten-
tative interpretive hypothesis: the one thread that runs throughout
Nerdrum’s paintings is a critique of the modern state, and, since we have
seen that he links the ideology of modernism with the ideology of the
modern state, his paintings actually carry on his critique of modernism
and in fact deepen it. The critique of the modern state is one element that
unites the two principal phases of Nerdrum’s career. He began by por-
traying the soullessness of life in the modern state, with its bureaucratic
indifference to human values. And in the major phase of his painting, he
went on to try to portray life in the absence of the modern state in an
imaginative effort to recapture the elemental aspects of the human con-
dition that modernity has tried to cover over and repress.
Several of Nerdrum’s early paintings, particularly the best-known
ones, appear to be acts of social protest. Given the fact that they were
painted in the 1970s, it would be easy to associate them with a number
The Importance of Being Odd 21