Originally published as: "On Malls, Museums, and the Art World: Postmodernism and the Vicissitudes of Consumer Culture." Art Criticism. IX/1 (Fall 1993): 1-16.

On Postmodernism and the Future of Art
By now it is clear that the word postmodern has a settled into an insurmountable usage in the field of architecture and this in addition to its continuing currency for art critics and theorists, social analysts, and political and literary theorists, not to mention journalists and philosophers. Nevertheless no one less influential for the real or built presence of postmodernism than Charles Jencks could complain that with respect to architecture, critics apply the term as a kind of catchall, so that postmodernism is used for "everything that was different from high modernism, and usually this meant skyscrapers with funny shapes, brash colors, and exposed technology."1

Yet if Jencks himself, who had no animus against a term he helped to popularize, if Jencks himself finds it necessary to warn against the imprecision of those critics who seem to have "just adopted a current phrase for discontinuity and lumped every departure under it,"2 patently, the word postmodern, the very word, also works as a red flag for the defenders of tradition and traditional usage.

However the term postmodern is expressed,3 the term continues to irritate thinkers and critics. Thus, despite the recalcitrant vitality of a term evidently in use for nearly a hundred years (according to a variety of historical tracings and a concept Umberto Eco claims may be discerned even in classical authors), in spite of the referentiality of the postmodern to the old ideal of the modern which coimplicates the (ever new) modern, academic writers on the arts (particularly (analytic) philosophers), continue to refuse the idea of the postmodern as hype or exaggeration. At the very least, even those authors who employ the terminology of the postmodern seem to feel compelled to condemn its construction as irrecusably opaque.4

In what follows, I do not aim to dissolve this prejudice. Indeed, I rather expect to bear out the darker suspicions of the more linguistically cautious and conceptually conservative. This is so especially where the topical range of this essay moves from malls to museums, city squares, art culture politically, morally, and most particularly as a business enterprise late-capitalism, and an extended word on the myth and cost of genius. In all, I seek to indicate the positive value of the postmodern, parodic ironicized role or future of art beyond a recitation of negative valuations of the state of the postmodern world, thus raising the question of the direction of whither — art.

The Architecture of Progress: Modern Efficiency vs. Postmodern Delight

It is in architecture, where the term postmodern has its least disputed provenance, the postmodern is negatively identifiable because of its referential component: the much touted parodicality or pastiche of the post-modern draws and plays upon classical as well as modern lines. The style of pastiche is the deliberate mixing of traditional symbols with decorative/functional design. The postmodern programme of pastiche as a style subverts undermines or decodes formally utopian and progressive elements. In architecture the style term postmodern is clear, because the contrasting style from which postmodern architecture distinguishes itself is also a clear stylistic category or kind. One knows what is meant by modern architecture: a modern style is immediately apparent indeed, it is perhaps all too distinct, one might argue, and seems odiously distinguished that one needs nothing like a guide to style to identigy modern architecture,5 and postmodern architecture is manifestly a reactive, counter or anti-modern style. Thus the department store is modern (to be discussed in further detail below), but so too are what one might call strip malls, flat store front complexes that dot highways throughout suburban and rural America; postmodern, by exact and correferential contrast are the newer mall complexes, particularly those that have come to appear in exact conjunction with the new overtly commodified re-visioning of the ethod of the museum: the malls newly built under museums such as the Louvre and like the malls incorporated into revamped railstations like Washington DC's Central Station or attempts at the same that one may find at various airports, like Pittsburgh or DC's Ronald Reagan National Airport. Postmodern too, by the same token, is now comparatively long-standing plan in New York City to appropriate the Eight Avenue midtown Post Office Building across from Penn Station as a postmodern ersatz (really and to be exact, a postmodern supplement to Madison Square Garden which as an examplar of the the Modernist plan for architecture was built on the razed remains of a building in an older more ambiguously identifiable but decidedly classical tradition (see Grand Central Station for the point and the ideal. But above all, one may think of newly built museums as postmodern, to the extent that one may even including the new Holocaust Museums in Washington and in Berlin. It is no accident that the object referent ordinarily invoked at this point (and the reference reflects back into the museum itself) begins with the museum, that is, a museum of the newest, postmodern kind, where the architecture of the museum is as significant an aesthetic object as the artworks housed within.

Thus illustrated, postmodern decoding and subversion is a serious, cultural affair. And such serious weight, such cultural value is illuminated by example and analysis, as Charles Jencks has discussed James Stirling's design for the Turner Wing in London's Tate Gallery or Stuttgart's NeueStaatsgallerie. Following and going beyond Jencks, one may also note the social codes of recently constructed (architecturally designed) public "spaces" (or "squares") in Pittsburgh (Venturi) and New Orleans (Moore's Piazza d'Italia) and, in France, Ricardo Bofill's deliberately bastard concept of the Parisian suburb's Roman/Greek (i.e., generic classical) Amphitheatre/Coliseum/ Temple apartment complex or, finally, and really incidentally, the museum-cum-public-space construction seeking to play upon old design and reflective complement of the "new" in I.M.Pei's Louvre pyramid.

Although I shall discuss both museums and public spaces in what follows, such references can be no more than marginal in both content and figure. I shall argue that the effective functioning of the postmodern as a cultural constellation can best be seen in commercial or even better: consumer-oriented architecture. By this I refer not merely to the buildings of corporate American power (viz., the AT&T/Philip Johnson "Chippendale" building an irreverent denomination missing the intended classical entablature and thus illuminating the postmodern joke) but the everyday achievement that is nearly everywhere to be found, most notably of course in North America, but also abroad.

In all, I refer to shopping malls, to the abundance of new constructions of and reconstruction in tellingly spoken of as "face-lifts" suburban/urban shopping malls and department store complexes. These face-lifts are all the easier to accomplish where "up-to-date" construction techniques combine "ready-made" construction with modular veneers; that is, where function is a matter of form and where form is reduced to mere or pure formality. Faced with gleaming marble, brass and chrome -- "gold" and "silver" glittering on blood-veined stone the surfaces of mall architecture reflect the grand-image value scheme of monumental architecture in construction and materials.6

I argue that the image-ethos of a carefully nurtured respect for the values of mass culture, be this a kitsch-similar shopping mall plaza in the streamlined (the image of consumer, "user" efficiency) late-modern mode or the postmodern, (commodity "efficient") practical design of recent shopping malls, facilitating the movements of a mass of people is an illusion but not a mistake. In other words, the apparent affinity for the values of so-called "mass" culture is in the end little more than a promotional schematic for conveying the (temporary) image of an exceptional aura. Like the new techniques for cutting wafer-thin panels of marble, substance is a matter not of structure but of seeming.

Miracle on 32nd Street: The Mall

A few years ago, a new "store" appeared in an obvious postmodern mode, resurrected in New York City's Herald Square with a certain flattened fanfare, with inevitably proximal echoes of Gimbel's and the modern competitive ideal of corporate capital and the fond notion of consumer choice. Gimbels, New Yorkers of even modest ages will remember, was a competitor of Macy's, the department store long and still dominating Herald Square. The new A&S in the interim, since departed not only as a store but a name, an entire company, lost from the retail universe calling itself Herald Center and so drawing (this is what makes it postmodern, whether one likes it or not) Macy's nominal connection to its own New York address, is a pastiche of both the verticality of the modern department store literal super market of linens and clothing, houseware and cosmetic goods, etc., and the rather later-modern (and suburban style) shopping mall mosaicism of reduplicative individual stores. This new bid for attention in New York's old garment district where it is perhaps easier to be ignored than almost anywhere signals nothing like a triumph of A&S over Macy's, still touted as "the world's largest store." Like Macy's or like Bloomingdale's and almost all New York City department stores A&S is little more than the outer husk sheltering invisible financial movements so that newspaper reports of "leveraged buyouts" go hand in hand with little signs assuring customers at cash registers that the near-bankruptcy status of the corporation meant nothing (while, of course, and this was the point of such little signs, as it turned out, it meant a great deal and A&S is now no more, though the mall itself lives on in the same locus and the concept has inspired further urban examples such as the revisioning of the Coliseum at Columbus Circle, but that is another article).

In fact, the new A&S store facing the square where Broadway and sixth avenue meet and diverge is not a store in the traditional sense at all. Although labelled as A&S at its entrances and on the building's edge with huge pastel neon lights: barber shop marquees, phallic top and bottom, it is not A&S, in fact, and it is not a department store. Within the stucture mirroring Macy's block-long presence in the same square, are to be found not A&S as such and alone (the plurality of its name then wasted) but rather a plurality of stores, indeed, and, as of this writing, several unrented, white-soaped windows, that is potentially an even greater plurality, despite the vicissitudes of the renter's market. These stores include the wildly successful British import, the "high" postmodernism of the Body Shop, featuring green wash cloths in little baskets and devoted to "traditional" shampoos, make-up and so on, manufactured in nature- and animal-friendly fashion, in addition to the redundant abundance of clothing and music media stores that constitute American and European shopping malls as such.

Displaying its non-utopian, image-conscious, casually postmodern ethos, the external wall of the A&S "store" is decorated with a simulacral trinity borrowed from the coding of transparent corporate and hotel architecture in a perpetual, hierarchic ascent of three illuminated "elevator" rectangles. Internally, the external code is repeated and (naturally) self-decoding in this repetition. Four "real" elevators, two on either side, frame the open-mall style court. At either end, ascending and descending escalators are to be found leading to blind walls and window displays. And yet the formal or progressive a-functionality of the design that seems obvious at first viewing is no more than a distraction which is soon revealed as illusory just as the gargantuan veneer of "A&S" mirrors Macy's monolithic presence.

Thus, to take the example of the escalators to the five/six/seven floors of the mall, the opposition to progress is not merely "read" out of the array with the insouciance of a discipline-violating academic's trivially critical interpretation of the design of the interior space. In practice, in effect so to say, when buying socks the schematic path of escalator-progress disrupts the intentional subject's bodily navigation of the mall and in the end converts and codifies the consumer's desire into an occupation. The problem of progress is the issue of the decoding of the outside the non-progressive ascent of simulacral skeletal elevators and the inside the vermiform effect of an escalator to nowhere.

As in the Beaubourg's intestinal industrial externalized architecture, an overtly mechanical evisceration of the modern dyad of form and function, exhibited via a roping mass of tubes and cylinders "people movers" the formal arrangment of the "outside inside" totalizes the import of the building's function.7 Like Wordsworth's imaginary American Indian Engineer, Hiawatha who fashioned found-material, killed-animal mittens of squirrel-fur, and for warmth turned the inside outside, keeping the warmside, outside, inside the escalators of the Beaubourg, as people movers, force and direct access to controlled and thus limited points of entrance and keep the museum-side, the object of desire, inside outside the people-side, the consumer/public side, outside inside and so correspondingly and ultimately, funnel them toward several and separate exits.

But where the Centre Pompidou (the Beau-bourg so gallically named for its aesthetic appeal) ultimately directs visitors either to its roof-top cafeteria or its exits, the functional architectural design, the architectonic of the mall schematic highlights entrances above all. In the postmodern mall, exits and "food-courts" are side-issues. Once within one is hard put to find one's way about let alone to find the way out and this is the point. As a postmodern structure, A&S's shopping mall uses the same post-Fordian industrial technique reflected in the Beaubourg escalators in design and transport to the same end. In this assembly line what is assembled is not the goods to be sold but rather the buyers themselves. In the code of its architectural integration the valences of ascent and descent are reticulated, and either way the visitor traverses broader sections of the gallery of stores than can match any desire for a product save the not incidentally and thereby generated desire to be in the mall for its own sake.

It is because A&S is a shopping mall that the evident anti-functionality (the presumptive architectonic coding) of the escalator design is as illusory as the transparent appearance of the external mock elevators. In a culture of the simulacral and the spectacle, the trek to the next escalator, whether successfully found or not, transforms the "visitor" willy nilly into a "shopper," that is, a committed, attentive tourist of shopping options. The mall shopper is a high-tech "flaneur" by default. The escalators could hardly be more functional. Where the elevators have been opened by the transparency of their walls to permit the shopper a vision of the possibilities at his disposal, the escalator in turn permits the shopper to "directly" experience these actual possibilities the commodities, the "things" themselves on the way to (in the way of!) her destination. In this same effective vision, the escalators in the A&S store itself convey an imaginary constitution of the shopper: as one ascends one passes oneself on the mirrored wall along the descending side of the adjacent escalator. This imaginary reflection, common to most department stores and malls, mirrors not only the shopper himself/herself, but amidst and in train with other shoppers intent on a common quest, the reflection projects the fantasy of capitalist culture, the holy grail, the challenging object that matches and fulfills perfect desire. Because these escalators too are blind, literal diverticul', alternating only by way of the reverse second double bank of escalators: any "efficient" progress through the tiers of the store is frustrated. Challenged to advance, the consumer and thus one becomes a consumer must circle to the rear of the escalator bank to continue to the next floor and so on. The procedure does not yield any straightforward compensation. Rather, to transform and conflate Benjamin's image, the shoppers are remade as flaneurs in the "age of mechanical transportation" b dint of the encounter with an array of commodities more bewildering by abundance than by the scintillation of appearance much less any shock of novelty.

It is significant to note the very postmodern advantage of this impediment to free passage not of course as a benefit to the time-pressured and harried consumer but rather for the corporate interests yielding the design of this "public" space. To see the contrast between postmodern and modern corporate ideals, as the difference between the postmodern imaginary of marble veneer, dazzling mirrors of glass and chrome and the modern image of effective progress, I shall offer a brief contemporary example to illustrate the articulation of public and commercial space. Returning to an even more cursory consideration of Macy's significance as gargantua, i.e., as the "world's largest store," I will question the postmodern representation of the future of art and the romantic image of art and genius for art's sake.

The architectonic of the mall, the hotel, the shopping plaza, is not only literally but figuratively reflected in Boston's Copley Place in the adjacent mirror wall of the Hancock Tower (Henry Cobb, I.M. Pei) as well as in the transformation of the function of the decorative city-square as market-place. The newly reworked Copley Square is nothing like a new-fitted agora. What was once a rather unpretentious and at the very least architecturally harmonious square in front of the Richardson-Romanesque Trinity Church has thus recently been re-configured to permit, among other "functions," an old-fashioned more central farmer's market. That Boston already sported such a market, indeed a traditional market which still operates under highway overpasses, amidst girders and such like, at the thus traditionally named Haymarket, suggests that the impulse for the (seasonal) installation of such a market across from the classical amphitheatre-style stepped construction facing the Copley Plaza Hotel, the Mirror Side of the Hancock Tower, reflecting Trinity Church in its turn and the levelled square itself, all under the gaze of the Monumental American Classicism of the Boston Public Library has to do with the cultivation of the so-called but not so placed Copley Place, which latter is of course, not a place, plaza, or square but a mall. Beyond stylistic pomo invective or invocation, it should be noted that the city square, re-designed and capitalized in accord with the latest marketing theory or trend represents not the differences so important to valorize for postmodern sensitivities but only the image or appearance of difference. Little vendor pushcarts on the square are replicas of the pushcarts in Faneuil Hall and in the mall itself. The new "square" is little more than a counterpiece, an echo or repetition in the age of mass/mechanical reproduction not an ironic quotation of shopping possibilities/prospects offered either in the mall itself or else to be found on the ever imaginary ewberry Street. The result is that one barely eats lunch in the square. Instead one passes through, one recuperates, one exposes oneself (in season) to the vendors.

As agora, the market has always been the natural gathering place. The trick is to conduct political life in the public space that is the space of desire, the life of the marketplace. The history of the modern era suggests that this has never been easy. Nor is this achieved in Boston, as it is not in Pittsburgh or New Orleans. It is not that the spaces here are empty, rather that the kind of use, the limits of use are at issue and conspicuously so. Like the public atriums large corporations declare "open to the public," or like the garden housing projects built in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere several decades ago, the (justifying) conception fails to match use in practice in real life. Shoppers or passersby gather in the new city square much as they would in a shopping mall gallery.8

But like the mall gallery, or the New York corporate atrium defined by city law to be made accessible to the public, the users of the new city square know themselves to be users, that is assigned access to the space on the terms of the provider. The new city square does not duplicate the function of an old market square, despite the proximity of the "market" just because it is not a shared space or a commons. It is thus noteworthy that Boston actually features a "Commons" so named and a "working" locale reflecting the special spirit, the "genius loci," to speak with Norberg-Schulz, of Boston as such. It is not irrelevant that on the Commons itself, this last genial value is there in spades, where the same local spirit is so elusive and (otherwise) so desired by designers that they even speak of designing not squares but "spaces" ad "locales." This is not to say that they fail, for where the old gods flee, some new simulacral god can come to stand. Thus the square of postmodern public life is absorbed in the simulacra of life that is the commodity and its desire, the functional life of the market place. If we fail to "hear old Triton blow his wreath,d horn," or miss the "sight of Proteus rising from the sea," we have a completely fluid world of trademarks and decorations: we are pagan enough but without antique convention, history, or "depth."9

Hence in the postmodern mall, hotel, or office building we have temple entablatures without temples, generic columns supporting nothing, generic gods no one can name, sacrificial decorations without a sacrifice.10

In the specific world of commerce, the question is whether Macy's can be said to represent the doomed competition of the classic art-deco modern ideal or whether it too is to be taken in the image of the (here) retrofitted and thus ever more secure ascendence of the postmodern? This issue is open to debate and Macy's is caught in the same economic maelestrom that may be said to have engendered to combine Jameson's terminology with Baudrillard's image and description the late-capitalist space of desire and fulfillment. Macy's re-designs its own floorplan seasonally. Yet in the archeological remainders of its design, in its base structure, still discernable at the edges of the retro-fitted post-modern, Macy's remains a paragon of futuristic modern (that is: consumer-, here customer-oriented) efficiency. In the service of this efficient ideal, banks of elevators, batteries emblematic of an "old-fashioned" modernity, provide local as well as express service to the highest floors. Even more archaically service-oriented in this context, escalators permit direct ascent not only to the floor but even the locale of choice in a reticulated array. Such facilitation of desire is an old ideal: the new post-modern merely invites or simulates the image of desire and the ultimate end is the array of the sale, the commodity display.11

The "efficiency" in this latter context is the permanent, unremitting sell.

What, if anything, has the image of the futuristic modern and the postmodern future illustrated by the contrast between two New York City icons of consumption and the contrast between consumer/customer and market/commodity efficiency to do with art?

In the wake of an extended metaphor or introductory parable any thematic question tends to lose its spring its legs have, as it were, gone to sleep in the meantime. To nudge this question to life once again, let me suggest that the point of comparison turns on the issue of the future, the fore-structure, the avant-garde in art. Thus we may note that just as the store of the future represents an outmoded modern ideal, the vision of the future of art in the art world, as the art of the future, is similarly dated. The old-fashioned modernism of the terms futurism and the avant-garde, even in the now almost patently quaint idea of dadaism work as descriptive terms providing an ethos of invention and a justification for innovation. This ethos was at once easily appropriated not only by the artists themselves but by generations of promoters and purveyors of art and by the consultants/investment advisers, curators, dealers, philosopher-aestheticians (as distinguished from those "aestheticians" who work in hair salons), and above all critics, historians, and so on. The art work itself, so categorized, is readily recognizable and (especially in the case of the avant-garde) the cultural ethos implied by both the critical terminology and the identified/identifiable artists could win advocates among the potentially, ideationally ever-open ideal of the "modern public" of non-artists and non-critics. This last public or mass connection that of consumer-relations is especially important for the projects of museum and documentary film and literary, artbook, or cocktail culture.

It is symptomatic of a postmodern sensibility that the vision of futurism, for example, is now regarded as "naive," and quaintly so, rather than falsely so. Thus conceived, the future itself is pass,, a dated phenomenon. Having reached its nadir in commercial influences as these survive (notably instructively - largely) in print advertisements of the streamlined twenties and thirties and in the abbreviated flair of the forties and in the television commercials of the fifties and sixties,12 "futurism" has been eclipsed or modified as a testimony to the factically post-modern condition of today's "modern times." The future, the real future opposing the future anterior of nostalgic return, is no longer presented as a streamlined, or stainless steel flared-fantasy or iconized in solid-state transistors, the latest intel chips, or reflected in the surfaces of brushed steel and metallic black, red, and transparent casings, nor is it to be found in any kind of control panel utopia. More and more, one encounters literary and cinematic representations of what one critic dubs the "new `bad future'," as Fred Glass in Science in Context refers to this conception of the new, the inescapable "bad" future, the future of the Terminator, of RoboCop, of low-brow revisions of Bladerunner, movie or video images of mediatized danger. Yet this "bad" future trend is less dominant and this is the crux of what is to be postmodern after all and all along than the sophisticatedly blasé, casual representations of anticipated "progressive" modes or fashions, proffered under the sign of imminent eclipse: apocalypse mode, that is, an eschatology of apocalyse without angst.

In this context, any new avatar of futurism resembles an inverted postmodernism. Technology continues its headlong expansion in its "new" projection, but without the utopian conviction, without the excelsior urgency of the modern vision. The advances of technology thus may seem without exception to yield environmental disasters but the anticipation of any technological cure-all is about as secure in the public mind as McDonald's advertised claim for the biodegradability of their styrofoam hamburger coffins. In this new "bad" or decadent profile, the "future" fits a casually apocalyptic contour, the advances of technology keep pace with a proliferation of side-effects, trade-offs, and the balancing of catastrophic costs with the meager benefits of variations upon the latest automotive and kitchen gadetry, eternally offering, despite new lineaments and variations, ever recognizably the same. The point here, the postmodern condition again, is that we are past minding.

Of course, if the appeal of futurism as a style in art depends on the appeal of the (imaginable) future, this constraint hardly holds for the avant-garde. The avant-garde is always possible. And hence if not the "reality" or practice at least the spirit of the radical avant-garde in art and literature continues to draw thinkers on the left. Perhaps this remains so because the avant-gardist style was chameleon enough to be counted as futurist when the futurist movement had viability, while yet being flexible enough to be lodged as dadaist, then modernist, abstractionist, absolutist, etc., so too as pop-art counter-expression, in the sixties and seventies, and hence to find itself in the eighties and on the edge of the nineties still preserved as a type of postmodern without or past denigration as the critical invocation of pastische that is, the postmodern conceived as still parodic, still reactionary.13

The difference between the postmodern, and the avant-garde (as indeed the futurist movement understood both as the ideological political/economic planning progress of futurologists as well as the Russian and Italian practioners of style) is to be found in the radical anti- or non-elitism of the postmodern perspective. The pastiche-parodicality of the postmodern, its double-coding, is deliberate and casual, disdaining high culture even as it offers these very icons for the consumption of mass reception or culture; conversely, the code offered to the critic is the code of this double-vantage. This anti-elitist spirit imbues even the philosophically sophisticated notion of a double coding14 with a conspicuously, deliberately vulgarized ethos.15

But if (postmodern, new avant-gardist, neo-political, that is pluralist) art thus eschews any elite assignment and with this disavowal we return to the matter at hand in the present essay what is the future of art? In oterh words, what is the point? the meaning? the nature of art? Here, the ordinary query posed in the voice of the ordinary man, the so-called average consumer, asks remains special about it? In blunt consumerist terms, if art is nothing but a commodity like any other, what's its particular worth? and where shall one find a reliable guide to its value? If this last seems an investor's question, that may not be accidental. But beyond economics, this question may be posed with a political edge in the (now almost buried!) wake of the Mapplethorpe-vs-Helms controversy, i.e., a recent contribution to the old pornography vs. art debate. In the interim we note that pornography no longer has a bite: instead we seek to raise hackles with religious provocations and as these fade, shock art has recourse to cadavers and indeed to dismemberment (self-dismemberment is old-hat, and if animal mutilation and torture seem new they are not: science has engaged the project of voyeuristic violation for centuries now.

In the US and elsewhere the problem remains an economic one. Should public funds pay for this? Thus the controversy of funding the (potentially publically offensive) arts is not only a constitutional issue. The question of censorship here is also very much a question of financial support indeed this is precisely what is at issue. For it is not enough that the artworks be offered for sale. The issue of freedom here and the stuff not of erotica, which probably does not exist as such, but of pornography, which does exist as such, has always been a hallmark issue for the freedom of speech in the US is not a matter of unhampered productivity, as formerly counter-political, reactionary artists and authors in Eastern European countries have recently discovered to their (somewhat touching) surprise. What is at stake is marketability and, because this is equally important in any late-capitalist market, subvention: someone has to underwrite the costs, someone has to "support" art. The art and intellectual community of commodification requires an imprimatur: the endowment support of an artist not only thus the academic pretensions of modernity certifies his or her market quality, but it also coordinates his or her marketability, while it also enables the artist like the farmer to survive (to ignore) the pressures of the same market. Despite the plethora of market-defined distinctions, the romantic, even avant-gardiste image of the artist apart from the market and market pressures (impurity) continues as the dominant definition of art as such. Even Warhol's deliberate mockery of the market and appeal or playing to the same was and continues to be interpreted as I have described it: that is, it is taken to be a deliberate mockery. Which is of course to say, Warhol's mockery of (appeal to) the market is regarded as separated from and opposed to and thus independent of market influence. This convicted innocence, the portrait of the artist as starving, tortured, but always pure, always ravaged by desires and visions beyond the market is the problem here. For by mutual and simultaneous definition marketable art, like the interest-free sanction required for the free approval of purely aesthetic delight, must not display its genesis or calculation in terms of the market.

Now national endowment and foundational support in the arts as in the humanities as, indeed, in the sciences themselves is not and has never been "pure." In a circle that any grant-seeker knows well, only those artists, scholars, and scientists already recognized as successful by institutionalized professional standards, that is according to the review of established "peers," are worthy of support. In the case of the National Endowment for the Arts (hereafter: NEA) controversy no "new" (taken in the strict sense as unknown or in the proverbial or even the literal sense as "starving") artists as such were involved. Hence, and most notably Joseph Papp (Mr. Shakespeare Marathon), could make a most public display of his post-Mapplethorp refusal of his own NEA award and thus show his solidarity with the ideal of art, that is, that supported by the public and granted, administrated via pure, that is peer, sanctions.

The image cultivated by the ideal of public support for the arts, suggests support for artistic endeavors apart from (values of) the marketplace. But in fact nearly all of the artists involved in the NEA debate were and are already established, meaning commercially, financially successful, recognized artists. In this sense, the artists/projects themselves had already passed muster as saleable the criterion of progress, as modern as it is postmodern) by the standards of NEA committee evaluation. What is to be emphasised here is the ordinary corollary of critical success, namely the criterion for failure. The new, the all-too-new, the unrecognizably oblique, or the simply non-standard or non-mainline, non-coopted theme or methodology, that is, anything regarded as not (yet or no-longer) art the non-marketable in sum is and has always been rejected according to the standards of such agencies of peers and peer judges that is of course inevitably a collective of anticipatory ressentiment and recollective, retroactive collusion as unsupportable. What the NEA supports is "Art." That's what a successful grant application means to an artist, and what it means to the purveyors, and hence to the consultant, to the investor, etc.; such a canonization, such recognition as attaining to the status of "Art" is the imprimatur conferred. Conversely, what the NEA rejects is, by definition once again, not-art.

This endowment canon reflects of course nothing less than the ethos of endowment suport, i.e., value judgments or, in still other words, the NEA's own moral standards. The "moral" outrage of the conservatives spearheaded by the all-too typically Southern stateman, Jesse Helms' good (old boy) confusion is the "morality" of the (so-called) voiceless public. The "moral" standards of the art-world are different, but no less moral, hardly less sanctimonious. Corroborating this parallel with Helms' proposed amendment, in the art world, the result is the same and to the same effect: only that which is sanctioned sells. What is more providing an indirect proof of the original market association between public endowment support and quality confirmation, the controversy itself has been an economic windfall for the purveyors of Mapplethorp prints, as for the sale of other associated works and corporate sponsoring of performance artists. Here it should suffice to recollect that in this first case there has been no run on explicitly homoerotic or high contrast botanical black and white photographs as such: only Robert Mapplethorpe's work and thus his estate has enjoyed the economic benefits of Warhol's famously approximate fifteen minutes of public attention. Yet beyond the burst of a popular market success, the issue can and should be seen to be one of moral distinction. Not only does the NEA and we may think of other endowment committees, including musuem boards and academic and other institutions operate by its own inquisitorial, even draconian standards but in the current political climate the challenge from Helms and the non-productive but consuming public in effect works as an indirect coefficient of those very same opposed standards.16

Art for art's sake.

Perhaps in the same way, the consequence of the decoding, massification of art suggests that art is a matter of promotion, of hype, and like the word postmodern, more than just a little exaggeration. Thus critics and investors alike can occasionally speak on behalf of the "consuming" public to ask why art should be featured as the cultural treasure of museum exhibitions and study institutes? This is a structural, material question. Such museums and study institutes, indeed, even the departments of art history, art criticism and studio art at the university level may not be separated from the world of commercial enterprise. Is the museum and more indirectly but still coordinately culpable, the university study-institute anything but the hawk of a certain vision of culture to structure and inform the possibilities of public consumption in a supplier's hierarchic panoply of original investment and the valuation of canonical reproduction? The cultural exposition that is the business of museum work requires fund-raising and grantsmanship but the museum is less and less any kind of public work. Indeed, like civic parks or monuments,ike city squares, or country markets one may ask whether public works exist at all.

In today's New York City, the public admission charges to museums match the price of admission to first-run movie theaters. Thus public "mass" support is offered from all sides, via civic and commmercial endowment support and once again then at the door and yet again in the profits won from the ubiquitous museum shops and mail-order catalogs. In addition, the circulation of curators from museums to commercial galleries means that charges of collusion between museum boards and these latter vending machines are no longer surprising if, apart from the Romantic ethos of artistic purity, such charges ever were surprising, one thinks of Berenson, one thinks of Winckelmann. More recently, of course, Hans Haacke, has made an artistic career of what could be called monumental and exhibitional ressentiment. Given both his talent and his success, this designation should not be heard as a subjective psychology of his work, or as any kind of denigration but rather as a simple description of the content of its presentation. Haacke's work is important and its message needs to be heard and this point must be made after the preceeding discussion of art and markets but its efficacy is questionable given the reflective critical deflation of sanctioned critique. The striking impotence of Jenny Holzer's deliberately derivative constructions (truisms carved in polished granite and white marble, or flashed in neon lights in Times Square or balancing the cost of success for a woman-artist and the obscene expense of an installation in the Venice Biennial) bears out this very point. If as Marcuse pointed out, the modern era is the era of one-dimensionality, the postmodern mirror schema flattens even the one-dimensional, subverting the critical effort of parody in the categorial impotence of pastiche. As Nietzsche taught in a different voice, echoed by no less a critic of the left than Adorno himself, the absorption of critique is the highest the most dangerous because most insidius will to power.

And yet if art is ineluctably commercial perhaps this is only to say that it has returned to its pristine origin as an organ of civic and religious culture for that is embodied by the commercial today but that that return is effected in a postmodern era. This era is beyond art, a culture of civic value after the death of the political (or its collapse into economic and ethnic competition as the current changes now political, now violent machinations and leading more often than not to third-world style indigence/impotence in East Europe and the Middle East suggest) and the death of the religious (or its cooption in the ethos of a technico-scientific life-aesthetic). And art has always been for sale.

What does this mean? Whither art? what is its future? Is it only an element in the commodity schemas of a post-industrial economy, an economy which has absorbed culture? Is it consignment to the design of MTV backdrops and choreography? We have discussed museums and public squares, supermarkets and museums. Is art expressed in the architecture of urban/suburban shopping "spaces," or the external "image" of massive importance or sleek technopower of a corporate city center or by way of a selective array of investment options "art" for the interior decoration of banks, executive headquarters, and other office buildings? And beyond MTV's video backdrops and technical proficiency, beyond the dancer's choreography, what of the music? Is music no more than what is experienced day to day, in restaurants and supermarkets, as a background, head-flattening, heart-deafening experience? Beyond public music, there is private music, carried in one's pocket or strapped to one's waist so that one's body in the open world is, as it were, "wired" for sound? Is music, as art reducible to a signifier of one's social class, as a taste, dominating one's living room, as a sign of material success: a static techno-array of stereo equipment, massive speakers, and rows of gleaming CD's? Apart from the investment value of art, the social significance of style, where is art to be found. I have suggested that an answer to this question must address both the manifold pervasiveness as well as the multifarious poverty of art in late-modern, high-, and perpetually capitalist culture. If even art for art's sake never worked for art's sake alone, than the loss of innocence Umberto Eco characterizes as late-modern/postmodern is not only the death of illusion but the possibility of awaking to the truth of, the shock of tradition.17 In this death, asking the question of the future of art, we need to be open to the possibility of being true to the past, a truth which brings the future.

This possibility is consonant with the still unthought but already celebrated value of pluralism. We do live in an age of hyperindividualism, with the very exaggerated sense of self Donald Kuspit has ironically underlined as the paradox heralding the Nietzschean death of the subject.18 And it is to this that the myth of the artist corresponds in a democratic massified ideal. The elite, esoteric few in our day includes everyone, whether by moral command (the imperative of political correctness) or capitalist convention. It is not that the idea of pluralism is to be unmasked as a fraud or revealed as impossible or as the enemy of the modern ideal of individual, of authenticity, of the proper but that to think genuine pluralism invites the same silence as thinking the individual qua individual. What is needed to prepare the possibility of a pluralistic future for art, not merely as the art of hyperindividualism with respect to (for) the other, calls for genuine solicitude: for the attention to the difficulty of the question for understanding and for action I name reticence. To be the consecrators of being and the now, the golden present, the moment, not just for ourselves but for others demands that we take care to note the difficulty of pluralism beyond the value of the word and the extraordinary elusiveness of true solicitousness in the reticent respect that regards the other as other and lets what is be in being, neither for us nor unrelated to us but as it is. Such solicitude is other the diffident distance that covers disinterest and it is not sycophancy sprung from fear or guilt, for it only works when those in power are charged to give themselves over to such reticence.

A full discussion of this moral-aesthetic imperative must be left for another day, but it is necessary to note in indicating this possible direction for the future of art that in speaking of reticence I am not advocating a politics of resentment or championing the masochistic cult of the victim. In raising the question of art and culture, of the relation between self and other, I have suggested that as a slogan, the idea of pluralism offers no ready answer to the question. This is not least because like the eclecticism so often identified with postmodernism, idea of pluralism still needs to be thought. To advocate openness, to take the part of the other is harder than one thinks. It has yet to be done where the very conception of otherness remains a unilateral proclamation uttered from within the discourse of reason.

Endnotes