then why are you still in a church?” In order to be anti-aesthetic and anti-
bourgeois, must one also be pro-narcissistic by default? Dada artists
were forever revealing that art is a sham in an attempt to make them-
selves superior to their art. Art may be a lie, but lies also strive to be
credible. A lie that is patently false is a failed lie, and it doesn’t reflect
well on the liar, either. There is no revelation in revealing the artifice in
art; everyone recognizes the gulf between an object and the rendering of
that object. The suspension of disbelief on an audience’s part is deliber-
ate but provisional: it must lead to either enlightenment or entertain-
ment. The Dadaists negate this challenge by disallowing the test, but this
is a defensive ploy. They knew a tawdry idea is more illusive and hence
more difficult to dismiss than a tawdry piece of craftsmanship. How
much “intellectual expression” lies behind drawing a moustache on a
cheap reproduction of the Mona Lisa? A stunt has intent, but it’s not a
dissertation. The inflation of interpretation supplies that, and the
explaining class is happy to comply. Any molehill appears to be a moun-
tain if you stare at it long enough.
The artist, however, cannot rightly lay claim to this added layer of
meaning. Dada has benefited from the metastasizing hermeneutics of
academia, and one only has to encounter yet another screed by Arthur
Danto that attempts to transform art into philosophy to see how these
notions persist like a stubborn cold. But when those who supply all the
external meaning move on to other things, a gesture becomes, once
again, just a gesture. Less is unfortunately less. Like serial composi-
tions, perhaps the only thing the Dada rationale ultimately proved was
that some ideas aren’t worth thinking.
Once Dada established the supremacy of the artist over art, a dozen
different schools appropriated the mantra. Pop Art degraded the artist’s
product even further through mass produced anonymity. The detritus of
consumerism was presented without context, as if the flaws and impli-
cations were self-evident. The consolation it offered its audience can be
translated into “I may be stupid, but I’m not thatstupid!” Scorn can feel
like wisdom if the object you scorn is far enough beneath you. But pre-
senting a specimen of popular culture isn’t the same as engaging it. This
static quality limits Pop Art’s range and gives its representative pieces a
strangely still-born feel.
No twentieth-century school believes more deeply in the power of an
artist’s narrative than Conceptual Art. In it, the prosaic is translated into a
statement. This dependency on the justification of meaning makes concep-
tual art unbearably didactic (although its refusal to state its thesis directly
produces a didacticism that lacks the courage of its own convictions).192 Geoffrey Bent