The Art World in the 1980s: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s At the Strangers’ Gate (2018)

“The crowd around the then influential post-structuralist magazine October loved the art that critiqued the system of commodification, without seeing that a system of commodification was exactly what had allowed the critique to emerge in ways it never could where commodification was prohibited. . . . The conservative cultural critics hated what they saw as the ingratitude and impiety of these things, without quite seeing that impiety is exactly what free markets in culture always produce. The radical critics, in turn, loved the ‘subversive’ nature of the impieties, without quite seeing that only free markets in culture produce them. . . . Something is always wrong with the art world, and the something that is wrong is always money. . . .

Radicals hated the system that forced avant-gardes into commercial galleries to be sold to rich people; conservatives loved the system that made avant-garde art, and hated the art that it made. Neither absorbed that the art and the system were the same thing seen at different moments in their propagation: A Jeff Koons was only possible under capitalism! And only late commodity capitalism could make a Jeff Koons. . . . 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. . . .

The relation between artists and writers, even when the artist is a writer himself, is like that between editors and writers. Editors are grown-ups; writers are children. (Even when the editor spends his daylight hours being a grown-up, he is still a child as a writer. I know.) Artists are angry supplicants, angered by having to ask for support. Writers on art are more often mystified by the artists’ anger, thinking that it is the subtlety of their discernment that artists admire, not their capacity as advocates. This is a basic confusion, not easily or quickly cured. The artist wants the critic for the same purpose the accused wants a good lawyer—to win his case. The critic wants the artist for the same reason the judge wants an interesting accused—to show off the subtlety of his reasoning. This misunderstanding never ends, and costs more in hurt feelings and sundered relations than one can easily imagine. . . .

Betting against new art is always a fool’s errand, not because all new art is good, but because somewhere in it lies—like it or not, believe in it or not—the psychic image of its time. Art traps time. It just does. The mood of a moment can’t escape the shapes of its chroniclers. To say that it’s the wrong art is to say, unbeknownst to the speaker, that we feel we are living in the wrong time. But, then, we always are.”—Adam Gopnik, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York (2018)