clothes. But it looks as if artistic and critical postmodernism has recog-
nized the bankruptcy of its (second-hand modernist) ideas, and lacking
the body of skills and taste to start making beautiful art again, and lack-
ing also the philosophical rigor and scientific knowledge to develop a
serious body of theory, is trying to see whether, if the stolen label
“beauty” were pasted on its work with enough authority, people will
believe it. Can the intellectual excitement that is growing around the
recovery of classical ideas about value be whisked away to prop up the
teetering economic edifice of the avant-garde art market? Can the
Whitney Museum wheedle itself back into the public trust, as really rep-
resenting the values of the good ol’ American people after all?
But one’s first impulse to laugh might be followed by soberer reflec-
tions. Observers of the extraordinary cultural currents that were flowing
in the Sixties could well interpret what happened then as the natural end
of the movement, already a lifetime old, that we know as modernism.
Something genuinely new seemed to be trying to be born. There was a
renewal of the popular grounds of art, an upsurge of interest in the past
(represented especially by the interest in Asian art and religion, and the
medieval ideals embedded in Hobbitdom), an optimism and rock’n’roll
confidence that was well on the way to healing the rift between the world
of commerce and the world of culture, an embrace of a different kind of
future. But then the movement was hijacked by the dour commissars of
the old left-wing modernism, who used the huge scandals of the
Vietnam War and race segregation as a tool to abort the nascent cultural
emergence, and divert its remaining energies into the dead end of post-
modernism. Left-wing modernism can be a wily and indefatigable
enemy, having appropriated to itself the whole cause of innovation and
revolution, which it now uses, paradoxically, to suppress all change.
Richard Serra’s message, for instance, is not essentially different from
the hoary old industrial functionalism and anti-bourgeois politics that
thrilled our great-grandparents; yet all he needs is an exegete like
Schjeldahl, and the congregation goes on with the service.
The present ferment in the arts and the culture at large is now, I
believe, too deeply rooted to be as easily deflected as it was in the
Sixties. But people like Schjeldahl can, by corrupting our vocabulary,
confuse and depress and slow the emergence of the truly new (which is
also the truly old). As an exponent of “language poetry” (itself a brilliant
piece of terminological misdirection, since this school of poetry
attempts to dissolve the semantic, logical, and syntactical DNA that
makes language generative in the first place), Schjedahl is an expert in
obfuscatory language. It would be tragic if the true successor to mod-130 Frederick Turner