At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  After the trot down on the stairs at 420, you would inevitably bump into friends, eyes set professionally aslant from the work of looking, and exchange a warm greeting and a few terse words about the things just seen. “A one-line joke,” you might say with a shrug, or, “It feels repetitive.” It was another form of shoptalk that had its own decorum. “Good work” was a term of highest praise; “lovely” or “beautiful” was critical, with a trailing “but…,” the objection unspoken always at the end. (“It’s beautiful, but…”) “Original” was no longer a positive term, marking a breakthrough. No, history-minded values had subtly been superseded by the ethic of solitary labor: “What wise painting!” was the first sentence I heard about Eric Fischl’s art. “Wise,” “strong,” “sad,” and “solitary” were all words of praise; “nice,” “new,” “fine,” “lovely,” and “powerful” all words of dismissal. “It’s just very strong and wise,” was a fine sentence to say. There were, I was learning, always two dialects at play in a shoptalk, whether at a fashion magazine or in an art gallery. At GQ there had been a fancy language for our simple readers—“chiaroscuro chic” and all that—and then another among ourselves: “Taste is all white shirts.” It wasn’t double-talk in the usual sense, misleading speech. It was just a counterpoint of in-talk and out-talk. On the stairway of 420 West Broadway, “intriguing” meant unimportant, and “lovely” meant embarrassing. If you knew that, you belonged.

  Then you would head east toward the galleries on the side streets: there were the two Barbaras, Gladstone and Toll. (I once spent a day at Barbara Toll’s, watching a severe young Scottish conceptualist tear up hundreds of men’s magazines—GQ, actually!—to make them into a Presbyterian-themed piece about the emptiness of commodity fetishism, the vanity of vanities. I kept virtuously mum about my connection.) Angela Westwater had the great Cy Twombly, whose scrawls and scribbles seemed potent with antique wisdom, and there one could also come across a late Philip Guston, as awkward and fatal as Samuel Beckett.

  The social life of those Saturday mornings was at least as important as the chance for solitary looking. All art serves a double function, and the double function of American visual art by the eighties was as both a mark of generational identity and a luxury good for the wealthy. You recognized your generation’s rage and secrets on a Saturday morning—the suburban guilt, the hunger for something less arid than a grid or a wall label, or just the truth that most of what you knew came from old movies and television—and then saw these become validated as things rich people owned and showed.

  Of course, it was the second function that offended people.

  Something is always wrong with the art world, and the something that is wrong is always money. In the 1920s, the greed of the millionaires and the cupidity of the dealer Lord Duveen caused Italian churches to be looted so Fifth Avenue mansions could be filled, and for sums—half a million dollars for a Giorgione Nativity!—then thought to be unreal. In the 1960s, fury turned on the Marlborough Gallery for selling Rothkos for hundreds of thousands. The punch line is always the same: And they thought that was a ridiculous amount of money!

  It was in SoHo in the 1980s, the story goes, that contemporary art was first made subject to the same principles of commerce—seasonal fashions, and “branding,” and salesmanship—as any other product, while the auction houses, not accidentally, began to sell the avant-garde modernism that had preceded our contemporary kind, for absurd sums. Among everything else that has changed since, this hasn’t. The market turned to the modern, and against the Old Masters, and the only way to feed the market became to make more contemporary art. Art was now available not to the merely wealthy but to the super-wealthy, to the tiny splinter group of rich people who have, since then, dominated it. Young painters like Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat became favorites of the dealers—that they were painters, makers of conveniently portable objects, instead of conceptual koans, was in itself part of the market mechanism—who then pushed their work on pliable museums and gullible collectors. The old values of art were overturned for the benefit of a new class of the hyper-rich, for whom collecting and investing were not only conflated but in principle indistinguishable. The market inflated new pictures beyond their intrinsic merit. Art was—though no one quite knew this at the time—mere kindling in the decade’s bonfire, which was really not so much a bonfire of the vanities as a bonfire of the pieties, by which the vanities, made ever more fireproof, were permanently lit.

  The tension between the role of art as the shared subject of a generation and art as so many baubles for billionaires was strange and constant. On the one hand, an Eric Fischl landscape spoke to a common intuition about life, real and rebellious—the drowning out of experience by imagery, the bad conscience of the middle classes. At the same time, it was a counter in an expanding game of chance, racing silks to place a bet on, a piece in a Monopoly game, a jaunty symbol the collector moved around the board. The mistake of the condemning critic was to think that, because the pictures were luxury goods, they possessed no other, more potent power; the mistake of the disillusioned artist was to think that, since they really were intended as cris de coeur, there was something wrong in their becoming commerce. They played both roles. They had to. Art is double, or it isn’t art.

  I figured out some of this on the run at the time, as we often do, some of it long after. Art always plays more than one role in a culture; it’s playing many roles is what makes it art. (Poetry, in our time, is either something you read and write in a classroom or something you give to someone you want to sleep with.) Double use is a sign of pregnant meanings. Craft objects are meant to play only one role, opening bottles or turning with the wind; if they sometimes play more, it is because of a discerning eye that emancipates them from their original purpose. Art objects are meant to play many roles; if they play fewer, it is because of a limited eye that imprisons them from possibility.

  In the early eighties, everyone was waiting for the next big thing, the movement that would succeed repetitive Pop and spent minimalism. At OK Harris, the place where the photo-realists had gathered, a movement had emerged that, according to my own training in minimalism, looked very much like a heresy. A kind of still-rebirth of figurative painting had already taken place, including some excellent artists—Susan Rothenberg’s horses had already caught my eye, and they have never abandoned it. But various micro-movements fought for attention: one gallery showed Pattern and Decoration, a sort of meek movement that seemed to be raising questions in halting American already answered by Matisse in luxuriant French.

  These were sectarian stabs at a next step in history, the thing that would be achieved. No one was confident quite yet. The Italians appeared—Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia—like characters in Evelyn Waugh. But the truly new energy that was rising was, as new energy will always be, more acidic and impious than any academic quarrel between abstraction and illustration. The really new impiety turned on the question of push, of ambition and its manifestation as art.

  Certainly, one cynical way to write the history of art in the eighties is as a transformation of the “work ethic” of the older generation into the raw ambition of the next, the austere seventies into the ambitious eighties. As Julian Schnabel and then David Salle and Eric Fischl and many more painters in their twenties had their first exhibitions, their readiness to rival big old “epic” painting using means that seemed almost to parody or, at best, approximate it—Schnabel was the most notorious, using broken plates to “animate” a surface with angst, and black velvet to darken it toward despair—enraged many, because it seemed so obvious, all push to be seen and no accumulated practice worth seeing.

  Ambition, everyone cried, had entered the art world—ambition unashamed to name itself, ambition unalloyed with apology. Ambition! Of all the words of the city, it is the most shameful, somehow, and yet, of all the acts of city life, it is the most essential. When E. B. White writes of the boy arriving in New York with a manuscript in
his satchel and an ache in his heart, he leaves out that he was also arriving with a drive in his belly, one that White, in his own discreet way, certainly knew well enough. The eternal ambition of young artists soon became a subject of momentary moralizing rage. Robert Hughes, my own mentor among the older critics, led this particular charge relentlessly and violently. They wanted money, homes; they were happy hamsters on the dealer’s wheel. And it was true, some of it: they did want nice things. But no more than he did. And the previous generations of New York artists (and art critics and curators and everyone else that trailed alongside) had wanted those things, too, and had, in some cases, gotten them. To visit the studios of the Pop artists, for instance, was to walk into townhouses bought in the West Village when such things could still be had for forty or fifty thousand dollars. The older generation had been more discreet—but, then, generationally, they could afford to be.

  The Blue Room effect that had been our first experience of New York was, by other measures, still the effective principle: there were too many people for too little space, and as the spaces got expensive, the people fought harder to hold them. Bob Hughes would rant, entertainingly, about the rancid ambitions of a Julian Schnabel, unearned in his eyes. And some of this was righteous, but much was merely real estate: Bob had bought his loft when one could be had on a magazine writer’s salary. Marx was not wrong about the essential thing, that most moralizing has its roots in money. People with a lot scorn those without—but people who got in early hate those arriving late, because things are getting crowded.

  And then there was the more common allergy to ambition, to announced ambition, that was perhaps part of the last American taboo. In the late sixties, when writers were breaking down taboos self-consciously—when the taboos still had power to enthrall and were pretty much begging to have things thrown at them—Philip Roth wrote about masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint, and the world was shocked and then thrilled by the violation. Norman Mailer, that same year, wrote about his vanity in The Armies of the Night, making the pious protests against Vietnam a theater of his own egotism, confessing that his vanity was as much at play at the Pentagon as his morals, that his competitive relation with Robert Lowell was as important as his condemnation of the war—and the world was shocked and then spellbound by the courage of the violation. But then poor Norman Podhoretz wrote Making It about his ambition, about how his place as a powerful book reviewer was the result of the same kind of ambition that had made other men stockbrokers and tycoons—and the world was shocked and remained shocked; even my friend Wilfrid Sheed was disgusted. It never let up, and the liberal Podhoretz had to change political clothes completely to start over. Sexual desire, vanity were acceptable frailties; announced ambition was still taboo. (Dick Avedon, being an openly ambitious man, I had seen, suffered from the stain, too. His efforts, perfectly sincere and utterly passionate, to depict the broken souls of ordinary people were often met by a resistance that suspected that he was depicting the broken faces of ordinary people in order to add more luster to his own name.)

  Ego and libido were acceptable “bad” motives. But ambition was not. When the “sordid” motive of making money is joined to the sublime motive of self-enactment (masturbation may not be pretty, but at least no one pays you to do it), the economic basis of the arts becomes a little too apparent. The Expressionist who sold his pictures because he had to is a hero; the Neo-Expressionist who sells his pictures because he wants to is not. The action is the same, the aura very different.

  So, in SoHo in the early eighties, ambition had to be sublimated into that other word—“work.” Ambition was the vigorous impiety of the time. That it worked equally well to get you on the cover of Vanity Fair and into the museums may have been convenient, but it was also contradictory—and eras in art, a little inspection of its history shows, are defined by the fecundity more than by the purity of their motives. You reach into the sock drawer and pull out two completely different socks, and you know you are in the Renaissance.

  An art village. Though far from a village atheist, I was becoming a secret doubter. I had been brought up in the church of avant-garde art by my parents, true believers, who had when they were younger amassed a small but (for college professors) choice little collection of California minimalism and New York Pop. I had learned the catechism of the avant-garde with the same credulous comfort that Catholics learn theirs. “New” was good; “busy” was bad; “clean” was good; “strong” was, too—a single brushstroke was better than several, and there was something slightly absurd in those who spent their time drawing bunnies or, God help us, people’s faces and bodies. This extended from the family catechisms to art movements that began and ended at the family dinner table. In the early months of our courtship, for instance, Martha had heard an inflamed argument my family was having at the round glass dinner table about the triumphs and limits of “generative art,” and, curious and diligent student that she was, not having heard of this movement before, she vowed to find out what she was missing. At the library, she couldn’t find anything about it, until finally she searched through some Canadian art journals, and discovered to her great chagrin that it was an art movement named, defined, acquired, and then excommunicated by the Gopnik family alone.

  So I was in an odd position. I knew the faith by heart. I was able to instantly parse each rectangle of yellow as abstract rectangle, ironic abstract rectangle, neo-rectangle, camp rectangle, referential rectangle, post-ironic rectangle, or simply as the paint sample someone had left on the gallery wall. And yet I was beginning to harbor secret, half-spoken doubts about whether or not this faith of rectangles was true.

  The truth was that, though my head was always engaged, my heart was only sporadically so. As a novice “critic,” I was a believer, but fading secretly in belief—and the only good comparison I can find to liken this process to is with those Catholics I have spoken to who, having grown up within the Church, slowly peel away. There are conversion experiences, saints fall off horses, but de-conversion is rarely an epiphany. Bringing the horse back to the secular stable happens at a walk. Faith arrives at a gallop, but it leaves on tiptoe.

  Still, those young Catholics—Bob Hughes was one of them—shared with those of us who “believed” in avant-garde art two things. First, there was our love for the indefinable aura of power that surrounded the activity. The proof of the value of the faith was the system each faith inspired. The light inside Chartres remains the best argument for Catholic theology, and the best argument for the continuing life of the avant-garde was the dense complexity of each Saturday morning in SoHo, where commerce, criticism, and croissants all joined in a vital compound. To say that the faith of advancing art was a substitute religion, with history instead of heaven as its divine principle, is not false. And the particular people who had been charged by this belief in modern art—in its ongoing story, its unexpected twists, its constant forward motion, its modest losers revealed as saints and its heroes as prophets, the Van Goghs and the Pollocks—were filled with the light of faith, in a way no one else in the secular or academic world quite was. Even if they struggled with their faith, as believers must, they had a quality of moral intelligence that lent the academics among them a grandeur of vision greater than that of all the other academics I had known. The most impressive of them, Kirk Varnedoe, believed this right to the week of his cruelly early death: that a faith of skepticism, of nonbelief, kept the transcendence of the older kinds of faith alive in a way that gave life meaning.

  Of course, modern art has always demanded a leap of faith, inasmuch as it asks you to look at obvious and unprepossessing objects and invest them with transcendental power: the bread and wine of the Eucharistic oblation do not appear to become the body and blood of Christ any more than the bicycle wheels and black boxes of the Dadaists and minimalists assume new meanings except by the insistence of their creators. The skeptical Catholic, still wanting to believe, knew at some level that transubstantiation was all in your mind—but the
y believed that the reward for suspending disbelief was so large as to make skepticism seem fatuous and unworthy. After all, where else would it be but in your mind? And since everything else went on there, too, why was the cosmic cracker any less real than the desire or lust or ambition that played out there on other material objects? The girl or boy you desire might be a mammal that shat and spat, but love or paralyzing desire was not therefore an illusion. The bread you ate might be a Catholic cracker baked in Philadelphia, but that did not make transubstantiation less true. Belief is belief, not argument.

  And even my professors, whom we would bump into touring the galleries, were capable of worldly action as academics usually were not. It seems absurd to say that studying advanced art proved its worth by the market values placed on its specimens, but we lived in this market economy and not some other. Robert Rosenblum, one of my teachers, soon became one of my good friends. He had bought Johns and Rauschenberg early, not as “investments” but as acts of friendship, of faith, and now found himself with treasures on his wall that would pay for houses and educations. He was puckishly amused by this fact, but a fact it was. Money, wonder, and glamour—the entire society had conspired to make the small gestures and decisions of the avant-garde resonate with value of every kind—and what better proof of faith could there possibly be than that? We build cathedrals not to enclose our beliefs but to let them resonate louder upward and out, as big public megaphones of our private mystical intuitions. When the intuitions echo so quickly and so loudly, how could one doubt being at the very center of the civilization?