Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
wrong. Avant-garde art, whatever the wishes of its makers and propagandists,
became the official art of the dominant class, to such an extent that the concept
of the avant-garde has not been able to maintain its original connotation of cultural
negation. 45 I do not mean to express by pointing this out what Clark
describes as the view “that any culture will use art as it sees fit, and that the very
idea of art resisting such incorporation is pie in the sky.” 46 This view involves a
misconception fundamental to the ideology of art, a misconception fatal also to
Clark’s more sophisticated view. Art does not need to be “incorporated,”
because it is not outside society to begin with; avant-garde production cannot be
“used” in this sense by bourgeois society (as, say, African art could be) because it
is a part of that society’s operations.
In identifying the idea that it is both subject to such utilization and strives to
resist it in the formal nature of Pollock’s abstraction, Clark attributes to Pollock
something like his own version of the ideology of art and of modernism in particular.
Given the centrality of the avant-garde idea for Pollock’s circle and for
him personally, this is a more believable reading than, for instance, Thomas
Crow’s claim that Beaton’s pictures reveal that the large-scale painting of
Abstract Expressionism “would always carry the meaning of stage and backdrop”
for the “courtly culture” of the art-loving American rich. 47 However
Peggy Guggenheim saw the painting Pollock made for her hallway, the image
itself embodies the artist’s response to the opportunity to work on a large scale,
transmuting the claim to public significance made by Mexican and North American
muralists into the assertion that his own artistic powers could stand
measurement against those of Picasso and Matisse.
Beaton’s photographs, Clark writes, are important because by subduing the
challenge of the paintings “they raise the question of what possible uses Pollock’s
work anticipated, what viewers and readers it expected, what spaces it was meant
to inhabit, and, above all, the question of how such a structure of expectation
entered into and informed the work itself, determining its idiom.” 48 Though
45 Greenberg himself, considering the problem in 1967—in an article written for Vogue, no less—
defined the avant-garde without reference to politics as “constituted by the highness of its
[aesthetic] standards, which depend on distance from those of society at large” (“Where is the
avant-garde?,” in idem, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism With a Vengeance,
1951–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 264. While he
thought it was possible that “the avant-garde as an historical entity may be approaching its definite
end,” Greenberg considered it likely that “the production of high art would . . . be taken
over by some other agency” (ibid., p. 265).
46 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, p. 363.
47 Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 48.
I cite this view—despite the unconvincing character of an argument about “the origin of this
kind of object” (p. 47) that mentions neither 1930s muralism nor earlier modernist large-format
painting, and that makes much of a myth about the cutting down of Mural to fit Peggy Guggenheim’s
wall—because of its author’s distinction as a social historian of art.
48 Ibid., p. 176. Unfortunately, he pursues these questions only negatively, in terms of what he
takes to be the pictures’ attempt at formal resistance to conventional reading.
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