By Patrick F. Cannon

I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. According to New York Times critic-at-large Jason Farago (rhymes with “Chicago”), “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.”

Thank God Farago is paying attention. I confess I wasn’t aware of how bad things had become. Of course, I feel duty bound to confess that I more or less gave up trying to be up-to-date on cultural trends around the turn of the century. Before that, I made some effort to keep track of the newest writers, musicians and visual artists. I read the Times, subscribed to the New Yorker, and trekked to museums and galleries not only in Chicago, but during my travels. I still do visit museums, but am inclined to search out the tried and true.

It’s no wonder then that I recognized few of the names Farago mentioned, Amy Winehouse being one exception. According to him, her “Back to Black” album was the “first major cultural work of the 21^st Century that was neither new or retro – but rather contented itself to float in time, to sound as if it came from no particular era.” Although I’ve only heard a few of its songs, that’s a pretty heavy load to carry. I did check out some of the artists he does admire, including sculptor Nairy Baghramian, and multi-medium artist Pierre Huyghe. Their work seemed little different from other abstract artists working today (or yesterday, for that matter).

The real problem with his arguments is his concentration on what’s happening today, as if our culture can be isolated in time. In fact, our culture is the accumulation of all that’s gone before. One example of a breakthrough work of art he cites is Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866,” which he says “was a radical eruption of temporal specificity.” But Manet himself admitted the debt he owed to Velazquez; indeed the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited his “Aesop” next to a similar painting by Manet (I think it was “Beggar with Oysters”), both almost life-sized vertical compositions.

Almost all works of art owe something to what came before, and we are perhaps the least able to judge the ultimate worth of what’s being created today. Let’s take Manet again. He was considered too radical for the annual Paris Salon, which valued the immense, highly-populated and highly-polished historical and mythical scenes that you can still see at some European museums, particularly the Louvre. Most people now see them as ludicrous, and much prefer to search out Manet and the Impressionists, who were also ridiculed by the establishment.

As to myself, I find little to admire about most contemporary artists. To me, abstract art has long since exhausted its potential, and artists have their eyes focused too closely on market forces. Many fiction writers don’t see the forest for the trees – how many novels set in academia can be written? And where has wit gone in popular music? Couldn’t someone as obviously talented as Taylor Swift stop obsessing about her love life? And isn’t there a reason why concert goers would rather hear Mozart than John Cage?

Of course, I could be totally wrong. A hundred years from now people might well look back at the 21^st Century as a Golden Age, an age when our culture reached a new peak. Or maybe not. We just don’t yet know.

Copyright 2023, Patrick F. Cannon