tied to the perception of particulars, and to a cognitive grasp of their rel-
evance to one’s life—not to abstractions. That is why the genuine arts
have always been mimetic, rather than abstract and symbolic.
In fact, the pioneers of abstract painting were themselves painfully
aware that visual art had always depended on representations of reality
(that is, on the mimetic re-creation of nature) to embody meaning in per-
ceptual form. They were therefore haunted by fears that, having aban-
doned such representations, their work would be perceived as merely
“decorative” (as indeed it still is by many art lovers). Earnestly though
they strove to create a new art, theirs was a failed enterprise. Nevertheless,
“abstract art” soon gained cultural legitimacy, owing largely to the
efforts of influential critics, collectors, and curators, rather than to a gen-
uine response on the part of a broad public—which continues to find
such work unintelligible, despite nearly a century of cultural dissemina-
tion and advocacy.^15
A half century after the European pioneers invented abstract paint-
ing, artists in America drastically shifted its focus and aims, attempting
to employ it as a means of direct personal “expression” in various ways.
Yet they, too, had persistent doubts that their work would be understood.
Like the pioneers of abstraction, leading Abstract Expressionists such as
Mark Rothko feared that their canvases would be perceived as mainly
decorative. Their fears were well founded, of course. A print of one of
Rothko’s typical canvases was advertised for sale in the Fall 2002 home
furnishings catalog from Crate & Barrel, for example, with the caption:
“Bright yet soothing, this appealing... abstract Rothko reproduction
makes a contemporary color statement.” It came as no surprise to me,
for under normal circumstances, uninfluenced by the exalted expecta-
tions set up by critics and curators, the average person is unlikely to read
Rothko’s work as anything more than a mere “color statement.”
The postmodernist movement that began with “Pop Art” in the mid
1950s was, on the whole, a deliberate reaction against the dominance of
Abstract Expressionism and all that it stood for in the international art
world. Unlike previous transformations in the course of art history, it
was prompted less by a sincere desire on the part of its practitioners to
create work that would be more effective or more personally meaning-
ful than by a mindless effort to displace the reigning stars and establish
their own position in the artworld firmament. Since the abstract move-
ment’s basic premise (that meaning can be conveyed without resort to
objective representation) was utterly false, a reaction was surely in order.
The form of reaction pursued by the postmodernists was equally false,
however. True, the Pop movement reintroduced imagery, on which the44 Michelle Marder Kamhi