ENDPAPER

The energies of cultural periods don’t last forever. The Italian Renaissance came to an end–not suddenly, like a snapping rope, but gradually, through fraying, mutation, replacement. And one would need to be an extreme optimist–some would say, a willfully blind one as well–to think that the big energies of American Modernism are still with us. Which is not to say that there are not plenty of gifted and interesting visual artists in America, doing valuable work at the end of the 20th century. But cultures do decay and run out of steam; and the visual culture of late American Modernism, once so strong, buoyant and inventive, and now so harassed by its own sense of defeated expectations, may be no exception to that fact. Modern art was institutionalized almost as soon as it arrived in America; it got its first dedicated museum in 1929, a mere 16 years after the unholy fuss caused by the Armory Show. Americans, more than any other people, came to believe that art progresses, that its value to human consciousness lies in renovation, seen as therapeutic in itself. In the arts at present, this cherished belief is falling apart.

One can view this with a degree of calm, if not with complacency. It seems unnatural or disappointing only to those whose expectations have been formed by vanguardism. Over the sourness generated by the much advertised “culture wars” of the early ’90s hang the famous lines from Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” But one should also recall the equally durable words of that all-American girl Scarlett O’Hara: After all, tomorrow is another day.