Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

CLASSLESS TASTE
world. Alexander Dorner’s meditations on the fact that “our conception art is
but a temporary fact in human history” offer a more plausible direction for speculation:
“The present thus becomes a re-formation of the past; the elements of
the past live on in it in a new and much more dynamic fashion.” This is a radical
reformulation of Baudelaire’s definition of modernité as the appearance of the
eternal in the ephemeral. The “growth of the present,” in Dorner’s view, “contains
no longer any eternal elements which may be conserved and, at best,
rearranged.” 12 The elements with which the future will have to work are those
created in the past and re-created in the present. Art has been and so far
remains such an element of social reality.
Musing on the future of the arts “in a more rational, more sociable society” in
1957, Meyer Schapiro thought it likely that “in a socialist society the painter
would cease to be a professional and would become an amateur like the lyric
poets and the photographers.” At present, the artist lives, when successful,
thanks to “an excessive valuation of his works that only a capitalist society can
sustain.” Society in general cannot sustain artists “for the simple reason that only
a few are good artists and every man today can be an artist.” This situation is
related to another important trend Schapiro discerned: “the reduction of painting
to a nonprofessional activity” ongoing since the nineteenth century, carried
in the twentieth to a point where painting “requires no elaborate skill in drawing,
no stock of conventional knowledge, but sensibility, feeling, and a strong
impulse to creation.” 13 Perhaps the philistine complaint about modern art—
“But anyone can do it!”—will appear as a virtue. Perhaps only a few fanatics will
give the time and effort necessary to create objects and performances responding
to what they, under novel circumstances, will judge the great works of the past.
That in itself would be not so different from the situation at present.
Such thoughts admittedly take us beyond the point at which speculation can
yield much of interest. But it is still worthwhile thinking about the possibility of
classless taste. Imagining a different social world helps reveal aspects of our
world we take for granted but need not. It is important to remember that just as
taste, aesthetic experience, and art as we know them came into existence at
some time—and not so long ago—we can expect them to be transformed in fundamental
ways if the political, economic, and ecological dangers we have
created leave us enough time to grapple with the need to change our world.
12 A. Dorner, The Way beyond ‘Art’: The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947),
pp. 15, 16. Teige is equally explicit: “There is no truth other than the occasional, ephemeral
truth. The basic feature of the modern spirit is skepticism against every dogma, every absolute
validity, every eternal value” (“Constructivism,” p. 333).
13 M. Schapiro, “The future possibilities of the arts,” in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society: Selected
Papers (New York: Braziller, 1999), pp. 192, 196.
182