ernism were aborted again, and we were to endure another thirty years
of postmodernism. I do not believe this will happen, for there is a novel
system of cultural communication emerging around the internet, the
new understandings of biology and biotechnology, the new corporate
campus, and the electronic media—a system of communication that the
print-based old avant-garde does not understand and therefore cannot
manipulate. Here the new cultural life will go on, instinctively attracted
to what it finds beautiful and true and good, unconscious of the suicidal
metaphysics of twentieth-century artistic radicalism. But the traditional
avant-garde is still the guardian of much that is great and splendid in our
history, our art, and our ideas, and the new movement will be prone to
major mistakes without the mentorship of a past that is sequestered from
the rising generation by the hierophants of postmodern orthodoxy.
Let us take a brief look at what Schjeldahl and Hickey mean when
they say “beauty,” “beautiful,” so that we will not be deceived or con-
fused when we run across such usage again in a less obvious context—
less obvious, in other words, than when illustrated and hilariously
undercut by a frankly ugly little picture of a Serra piece. Schjeldahl’s
description of the piece gives us the necessary clues. He praises it in the
same terms as one might praise the topology of those MacDonaldland
kiddie adventure gyms that entertain the sucrose-addled young while
their parents are finishing up their fries: the passage through turns this
way, then that, and then, gosh, it does thus and so! But MacDonaldland
sculpture has the advantage of bright colors, even a weird poetry in the
semitransparent glow of its red and green plastic, and the odd blue sky
one comes out into at the end. Its youthful audience cannot yet know the
boredom of an ungenerative set of angular differences, of a limited set
of permutations, the misery of an endess tic-tac-toe game; the
MacDonaldland passageways are a brave new adventure, the tic-tac-toe
game is a mysterious realm of strategy and counter-strategy. The plastic
jungle gym is also portable and easily disposed of afterwards, which is
more than one can say for a Serra. But perhaps this is unfair: Serra
praises himself in a recent interview for his use of cor-ten steel, which
only rusts to a certain depth, forming a brown, excrementitious crust,
and which thus still counts towards the nation’s strategic steel reserves.
But seriously, current avant-garde aesthetics cannot do other than
flail around aimlessly, in the absence of a real connection with nature
(which might come from solid scientific knowledge) or with the world
of the spirit (which might come from a philosophy and practice of reli-
gion). Neither science nor religion have any legitimacy for the avant-
garde, because to a self-styled rebel of postmodernism, they postulate
A Changing of the Avant Guard 131