The Art Institute of Chicago`s blockbuster exhibition of work the Nazis had branded ``degenerate`` comes at a time when spectators are ready to draw contemporary parallels.
Most obvious is the one that sees the threat to government funding of the arts as a form of censorship comparable in intent to the efforts of the National Socialists.
But there is another, subtler relationship, more fraught with irony. To outline it we must first return to an original definition of ``degenerate,``
free from associations made by the Nazis.
This usage defines the word simply as ``characterized by lower standards.`` Which is, of course, a complaint often voiced by aesthetes and philosophers. It recurs so frequently throughout history that one has learned to take it as little more than an audible sign of nostalgia or the gap between generations.
But to do so is to ignore the incontrovertible fact that, at times, artistic production has been characterized by lower standards. And during such times, the use of the term degenerate is more precise than villainous.
To say the quality of art has fallen off is quite different from advocating censorship. So one should understand that work showing degeneration is more often ignored than ridiculed or suppressed. However, the last decade brought a reversal, as a good deal of art that clearly indicated decline did not go out of the public eye but achieved phenomenal success.
The hottest American artists of the `80s-Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons, David Salle, Julian Schnabel-represented a distinct comedown from achievements of the past in ways that were not vague or merely a matter of opinion.
Fischl told this writer in 1985: ``What I really needed to know (as a figurative painter), I had no skill in, which was drawing. When I went to school (at the California Institute of the Arts), it was the end of the 1960s and education was about all sorts of `advanced` notions.
``They frowned on drawing. They didn`t teach it. They didn`t teach art history either. Basically they believed that if you wanted to reproduce something, there were mechanical means, photosilkscreen or photography or what-not. Drawing came to me much later-after a hell of a lot of work.``
For Schnabel, it did not come at all, though he was the only one of these artists to receive a major museum exhibition devoted exclusively to drawings. Of course, one might discern capacities of hand and eye from the kind of drawing found in his paintings, as critic Robert Hughes did early on, finding it consistently awful.
``Hughes sees Schnabel`s exaggerated, Neo-Expressionist style as a cover- up for simple ineptitude,`` wrote journalist Pepe Karmel in 1985. ``Ask around the art world and you`ll find that this low opinion is widely shared. . . . But the collectors love him. Since 1979, his shows have been sold out even before they opened, and there is a waiting list of buyers eager for whatever he produces next.``
The same was true of Salle, who projected and traced appropriated images that had no greater impact when rendered in pigment than when seen in photo-reproduction. This was painting in only the most elementary sense of the word. It showed no mastery of technique or understanding of the medium. It was more like a rebus produced by a commercial artist who specialized in bringing together images that might be puzzled over.
The emphasis was on painting as idea. The object itself did not matter, being a negligible means of conveyance. This accounted for the deadness of each surface; nothing important to the practice or development of painting took place there. The images might well have remained in Salle`s opaque projector.
``Appropriation, the hyperreal, simulation; the palate is jaded, even repelled,`` wrote Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, editor of Artscribe magazine earlier this year.
``Although some of the work which traded off its theoretical inflatables had a mordant humor which continues to exert a nostalgic appeal, it is clear now that art (of the 1980s) lost its autonomy in ways which should have been questioned more-by its producers: artists, critics, dealers and the magazine.``
One should note that this acknowledgement of degeneration comes from someone within the charmed circle, for whom contemporary art is not a novelty or an amusement but daily bread. That it no longer is found to nourish thus is important. Who better to know than one with a steady diet?
Perhaps the most surprising evaluation came in 1989, from curators who worked on the biannual exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. ``We have moved into a situation where wealth is the only agreed-upon arbiter of value,`` they wrote.
``Capitalism has overtaken contemporary art, quantifying and reducing it to the status of a commodity. Ours is a system adrift with mortgaged goods and obsessed with accumulation, where the spectacle of art consumption has been played out in a public forum geared to journalistic hyperbole.``