explain the emotional immediacy of the mimetic arts. Mimesis is not in
itself the end, or goal, of art, but it is the powerful meansby which works
of art convey their cognitive and emotional content. The avant-gardist
tendencies of both modernism (most radically, in the trend toward
nonobjective art) and postmodernism have flouted this basic truth, to the
detriment of both art and cognition.
Conclusion
To return to the theme of this volume, the future of the arts, that future
is likely to be a dismal one in the realm of the visual arts, unless there is
widespread recognition of both the mimetic nature and the cognitive and
emotional function of art—and a concomitant rejection of what has
passed for art under the misleading rubric “avant-garde.” Until that time,
the equivalent of Gresham’s law will continue to operate in the artworld.
Spurious art—which, like paper money, is readily multiplied—will con-
tinue to drive out genuine art in the marketplace, as long as it is granted
legitimacy by the institutions of culture.
Postscript
The preceding Conclusion, originally penned about a decade ago, holds
no less true today. If anything, “avant-garde” assumptions and practices
have become even more firmly entrenched in our leading cultural insti-
tutions—as Louis Torres argues in a later chapter of this volume.
To drive my point home, I will cite just two examples here. Most
telling is a brief exchange I had in 2013 with Glenn Lowry, the director
of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The occasion was a press pre-
view for the museum’s first exhibition of the postmodernist invention
called “sound art.” Contrary to what one might expect from the show’s
title—Soundings: A Contemporary Score—it did not deal with music. It
instead consisted of such pieces as an “exploration of how sound rico-
chets within a gallery,” field recordings of sounds made by echo-locat-
ing bats, and a manipulated recording of sounds made by various species
of creatures in the range above human hearing capacity, which were then
lowered to render them audible to us.
In remarks to the press, Lowry frankly acknowledged that much of
the work was “almost scientific” in nature, some of it “very scientific.”
He nonetheless declared that he was very “excited” to present such work
because he deemed it the museum’s mission “to follow artists wherever
they’re going.” When I asked if he might ever consider that where
Mimesis versus the Avant-Garde: Art and Cognition 49