The Death of Art: On Kuspit's The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist

Abstract

The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Donald Kuspit, 1993, New York: Cambridge University Press, 175 pages. which his reviews of hundreds of works of visual art have appeared in major art magazines and in Art Criticism, the journal he edits. Kuspit is an art historian, philosopher, and art critic who is trained in psychoanalysis and well-versed in postpsychoanalytic thought. He employs concepts from Freud, Fromm, Winnicott, and Kohut-along with his own contributions to psychobiography and psychodynamic personality theory-to explicate the shift that has taken place from avant-garde to postmodern art. His approach to criticism focuses the same kind of attention on visual art and artists that has long been given to literature and writers. The book brings together a cultural critique of capitalism and of postmodemism with a penetrating psychological analysis of the cult phenomena that pervade the contemporary art world. Kuspit is keenly aware of the narcissistic dangers that abound for artists who attempt to shape an identity while living in a culture that values celebrity over authenticity, and surface over substance. Kuspit's writing is rich and expressive. His method is more aligned with what Baudelaire called poetic as opposed to mathematical criticism (1846/1964, p. 38). It is criticism that attends to what the artist evokes-not just what the artist's work signifies. Because he is as comfortable in the art world of Soho as he is in the academic settings of Cornell University and The State University of New York at Stony Brook where he teaches, his style is both hip and scholarly. Kuspit begins with the assumption that most avantgarde art has a therapeutic intention. He further posits that As an artist and psychologist, I have certain expectations for the art criticism I read, expectations that are not easily fulfilled. I look for writing about art that enhances my experience of art works and that deepens my understanding of artists, without doing injustice to either. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to do injustice to both. At its worst, art criticism can unwittingly reduce the experience of the sublime and beautiful to mere perception, of creativity to ordinary behavior. It can also carry interpretation too far, committing deterministic reductions and intentional fallacies and risking either romanticizing or pathologizing the artist. (Positivism and Freudianism have both taken a toll on our understanding of modern art.) What I need, therefore, is balanced art criticism that is both sensitive to the subtle phenomenology of aesthetic perception and that leaves the psyche of the artist intact. Good art criticism also meets more general needs. It helps us understand why we like what we like. It gives meaning to our preferences and interests. Moreover, it puts things in context: It creates a historical and cultural backdrop for what we see. It also allows us to see more, or more clearly. It reveals a previously hidden order of perception or a new perspective, orienting us toward experiences in the world-and in ourselves-that we might otherwise miss. The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist meets many of these needs. It does so because Kuspit has successfully integrated aesthetic and psychological perspectives. The book makes explicit Kuspit's theory of 20th-century art, a theory evolved over several decades during neo-avant-garde, or postmodem art at once mocks and denies the possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and