In 1962, in a remarkably prescient essay titled “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name,” the critic Clement Greenberg indicted contemporary art criticism for indulging in “a fatality of misinterpretation that was also a fatality of nonsense.” Taking as his point of departure Harold Rosenberg’s celeb rated but wildly incoherent essay on “action painting” (a phrase that had ripened into one of the chief critical catch-phrases of recent decades), Greenberg showed how a great deal of what then passed for art criticism was really just pompous blather that had virtually nothing to do with art. “It was,” he wrote, “as though the critics of modern art set out to justify everything that philistines have said about them.” Heavy with its load of pretentious terminology cribbed from other disciplines, such writing wasn’t simply fake criticism, it was fake everything: “pseudo-description,” Greenberg called it, as well as “pseudo-narrative, pseudo-exposition, pseudo-history, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, and . . . pseudo-poetry.”

For anyone interested in the arts and art criticism, the early Sixties must seem like a cultural Arcadia compared to the Eighties and (so far) the Nineties. Greenberg had pointed out that “the absurd” proliferated in art criticism “with greater vigor perhaps than anywhere else in our culture . . . . Contemporary art criticism is absurd,” he explained at the end of his essay,

Today, alas, the disease that Greenberg identified in writing about art has become epidemic, as even a peek into the pages of contemporary academic criticism of art or literature amply shows. No rhetoric is too extreme, no language too barbarous for our critics. And as for logical fastidiousness, the effort to make one’s prose clear, consecutive, coherent—well, all that was long ago consigned to the ash heap of “objectivistic” or “patriarchal” thinking. The vistas of inanity that Greenberg conjured up now dominate the cultural horizon.

But criticism is not the only thing to have been debased since the early Sixties. Art itself as well as the institutions—the museums and galleries—that exhibit and promote modern art have undergone an analogous devolution. They, too, have suffered from rhetorical excesses, logical solecisms, and “vistas of inanity.” Part of Greenberg’s point in “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name”—it was the silver lining in the otherwise gloomy analysis he provided—was that the signal achievements of modern art had outrun the categories of traditional criticism. While art criticism wallowed in its mire of verbiage, there were artists—Smith, Pollock, de Kooning, and Motherwell among them—who had produced excellent new work whose aesthetic significance escaped the ditherings of much contemporary art criticism. Today, however, most of the art that forces itself on the public’s attention is infected with the very absurdities Greenberg discerned in the fashionable art writing of thirty years ago.

This is not simply to say that there is a lot of bad art around. It is always the case that vastly more bad art than good is produced. What is different today is the way in which much highly touted art is bad. Until recently, art that failed generally did so in an easily recognizable way; that is, it failed in an effort to be good art, where “good art” signified a complex but nonetheless specifiable category of accomplishment. Perhaps the failed art was technically incompetent; perhaps it was hackneyed or trite; perhaps it was showy and meretricious. In art, as in life, there are innumerable ways to fail. Yet even in the midst of its failure, bad art declared the cogency and value of good art; for the qualities we attribute to good art were precisely what the bad art had attempted but conspicuously failed to achieve.

This is no longer the case. The pseudo-criticism that Greenberg excoriated has helped to spawn a new species of bad art. This is art that fails not because it falls short in its effort to be good art but because the artists who make it have abandoned the quest for aesthetic distinction altogether. “Art” in any traditional sense no longer matters to them. What matters in the art world today are “ideas”—ideas and the demotic parody of ideas that fill the pages of our critical journals and, increasingly, the walls and the nooks and crannies of our galleries and museums devoted to contemporary art.

For some time now we have seen objects and behavior that can be called art only by dint of extreme lexical generosity blithely accorded the status and perquisites of art. No doubt Marcel Duchamp—who cynically proffered such quotidian objects as a urinal, a bottle rack, and a snow shovel as works of art and was stunned to see them taken up and praised by the critical establishment as, well, as art—is one of the main progenitors of this state of affairs. But wherever we place the responsibility—not to say the blame—for the confusions rampant in the art world today, there can be little doubt that many artists and critics are in the grip of a new didacticism that subordinates aesthetics to ideas and, indeed, to ideology.

What is the cultural significance of this subordination?

What is the cultural significance of this subordination? What do we lose when artists and critics relegate the aesthetic dimension of art to a minor role or completely exclude it? What sort of ideas step in to take the place of aesthetic considerations? What lessons, finally, are artists and critics attempting to teach us? As we enter upon the Nineties, we are offered an exhibition that seems custom-made to provoke such questions. In both its selection of artworks and the intellectual frame it assumes, “Culture and Commentary: An Eighties Perspective,” on view this spring at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.,¹is a veritable inventory of the trendy attitudes that form an up-to-date incarnation of the kind of excesses that Greenberg had in mind.

Organized by Kathy Halbreich, a curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “Culture and Commentary” contains approximately sixty works by fifteen artists who came to prominence in the Eighties. Among the artists represented are such well-known figures as Jenny Holzer, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Laurie Anderson. In addition to paintings and sculptures, the exhibition features photographs, videos, and what have come to be called “environmental installations”—all in all, a diversity of media that echoes the diversity of the contemporary art world and, Miss Halbreich conjectures, “signals the final abandonment of traditional hierarchy of media.”

Most of the contents of “Culture and Commentary” will be familiar to anyone who kept an eye on developments in the art world in the Eighties. Julian Schnabel weighs in with a few of his famous paintings encrusted with broken plates and a couple of paintings on black velvet. It should perhaps be mentioned that Mr. Schnabel also has the distinction of having created the only work in this exhibition that can claim even a minimum of aesthetic interest: a sketchy but straightforward full-length portrait of his wife painted in 1980.

Laurie Anderson is represented by O Superman, a nine-minute videotape that plays continuously from a color television set placed near the entrance to the exhibition. Like most video art, O Superman is basically an agglomeration of politically tinged clichés. Miss Halbreich’s commentary effectively summarizes the tenor and mood of the piece: “With equal measures of despair and irony, Anderson locates comfort inside the might of the military and market, a tune often sung by speech writers for paternalistic politicians who also confuse might with right.”

Other items in the exhibition include a water-filled glass tank in which two basketballs float (Jeff Koons), some stone benches and large framed posters covered with aphorisms like ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE (Jenny Holzer), and an installation of some extremely uncomfortable-looking furniture called “Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room #4” (Siah Armajani). Sherrie Levine and Robert Gober collaborated to bring us an installation consisting of a large, nearly empty room hung with wallpaper dotted with the image of a white man lying in bed dreaming of a black man who has been hanged. Around the room are scattered such edifying objects as a few realistic-looking bags of cat litter (Mr. Gober) and blow-ups of panels from the comic strip Krazy Kat (Miss Levine). A wall label informs viewers that the installation is a comment on “a tragic history of oppression and disenfranchisement. This collaboration by Gober and Levine is aimed directly at the complacency of the dominant culture in the face of historic wrongs that have yet to be set right.”

Artistically, “Culture and Commentary” is an exhibition of the utmost banality and aesthetic poverty. But this is hardly surprising. Despite a fervent declaration in the catalogue’s acknowledgments that “art matters,” it is clear that art is the last thing on the agenda of “Culture and Commentary.” This is obvious not only from the feeble aesthetic quality of the works on view but also from the way the artists were selected. There is no guiding taste or aesthetic intelligence in evidence in this exhibition. On the contrary, what we are given is merely a random selection of names that dominated the art-world hit parade in the Eighties.

What is very much in evidence, however, is a guiding political program that poaches on the prestige of art to further its aims. At the center of this program are all the radical slogans and sentiments that are abroad in the art world today. Everything from ferninism and a distrust of capitalism to environmentalism and a grab bag of ill-digested ideas from various French philosophers are swept together in a dizzying melange. Adherence to this program sometimes requires great critical ingenuity. Consider, for example, Miss Halbreich’s commentary on the bric-a-brac that the German artist Katharina Fritsch has managed to pawn offas art. “The sadness at the heart of Fritsch’s work,” she writes,

And this is about kitschy little plastic flowers, figurines of cats, and plaster Madonnas!

The first image to confront readers of the catalogue for “Culture and Commentary” is a photograph of the space shuttle Challenger exploding in midair; the last image is a photograph of a hundred-yen bank note. Perhaps the juxtaposition is intended to symbolize the twin dangers of Western technology and Eastern plutocracy: Miss Halbreich never says. But it is clear that she has invested the exhibition with great intellectual ambition. In her catalogue essay, she tells us that “Culture and Commentary” attempts “to locate a particular set of intellectual concerns that have informed the cultural dramas of the past ten years and influenced the artists whose work best comments on those societal changes.” There is no consecutive argument that sets forth these “intellectual” concerns; but there is a unifying tone and animus that informs Miss Halbreich’s writing. In an admiring review of the exhibition, a critic for the The New York Times wrote that the catalogue is “filled with ideas.” “Filled” is definitely the mot juste. Here are a few specimen passages:

In other words, “Culture and Commentary” is little more than a smorgasbord of radical and Left-liberal clichés serving the ubiquitous triumvirate of gender, race, and class. Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Western society, men—especially white men—are duly criticized; anything that diverges from the “repressively mainstream” (is there a mainstream that is not “repressive”?) is hailed.

Miss Halbreich also serves up a large portion of the pseudo-philosophical erotica that festoons so much contemporary criticism. For example, she describes the painter Francesco Clemente as “a modern day fabulist—the oracle of orifices—whose sensuous and disquieting tales picture the search for cultural distinctions represented in myth and fixed in the memory of a time before colonialism and television. . . . His imagery,” Miss Halbreich continues,

Vistas, great stretching vistas, infinite vistas of inanity: Mr. Greenberg hardly knew the half of it.

In addition to Miss Halbreich’s vapid reflections, this catalogue “filled with ideas” concludes with five brief essays by people whom it pleased Miss Halbreich to call leading humanists. Two of these leading humanists, Vijak Mahdavi and Bernardo Nadal-Ginard, are professors at the Harvard Medical School. They collaborated on an essay called “The Human Spirit in the Era of Genetic Engineering,” which is essentially a sermon on the marvels of genetic engineering. “What we care most about is not quantity but quality of life,” the authors inform us. “What we want is the power to reduce the amount of physical and mental suffering. The DNA revolution is a means to that end.”

Then there is an essay by that leading humanist, the popular novelist Michael M. Thomas, about the moral dangers of money in our greedy, credit-driven, capitalistic society. One is grateful, at least, that Mr. Thomas confined himself here to something he knows about. Another leading humanist, Sherry Turkle, contributed an essay about computers, artificial intelligence, and postmodernism, while Maurice Culot, a French architectural historian, provided an elusive essay about urban renewal and modernism. It is not clear whether we owe the observation that “until his death in 1927, Eugene Atget had never photographed a modern building” to the translators’ incompetence or M. Culot’s own sense of paradox.

No contemporary art catalogue is complete without some self-righteous hand-wringing about AIDS.

No contemporary art catalogue is complete without some self-righteous hand-wringing about AIDS. Miss Halbreich does her bit along the way, but she has also engaged Simon Watney, who—in addition of course to being a leading humanist—is an art historian and “AIDS activist” and the author of Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. Among much else, Mr. Watney’s essay on “Representation and Sexual Identity” tells us that “AIDS continues to be used to shore up the fragile categories of sexuality throughout the West” and that “the AIDS crisis has forced a new awareness of the need for a full-fledged assault on the systematic double standards and cruelty of the categories of Western sexuality and the extreme limitations of formalist aesthetics in a period of intense social transition.”

What are we to make of this heap of politicized intellectual debris? It would be comforting if we could say that “Culture and Commentary” were some bizarre aberration in the annals of contemporary art and criticism. Unfortunately, it is simply the going thing in the chic purlieus of the art world. Our museums and galleries and even our classrooms are full of this sort of thing. Indeed, what makes the exhibition significant is not its novelty but the opposite: the fact that it so perfectly mirrors the politicized program fueling so much of our cultural life today. One cannot even claim that the artists Miss Halbreich has chosen to exhibit have been (as they say) “co-opted” by her rhetoric. Like the critics who champion them, the artists, too, have given up on art for the sake of radical political pronouncements and fragmentary, often pathetic attempts at radical cerebration—as well as, it must be said, assiduous sallies on that precinct of capitalistic ambition known as the contemporary art market.

Of course, the real tragedy in all this is that the genuine art of our time is left utterly out of account. Wedded to these ever-widening vistas of inanity, fashionable artists and critics are drifting farther and farther from any contact with the realm of aesthetic experience, which—despite the noisy cultural vicissitudes and depredations of the Eighties—remains the true source of art and the gravamen of criticism. What these artists and writers—and increasingly, alas, the public as well—are left with are series of objects that range from the trivial to the repulsive, accompanied by endless commentaries that present a variety of tried and true political slogans in as pretentious a manner as possible.

Miss Halbreich’s essay is preceded by no fewer than six epigraphs, taken from sources as diverse as Andy Warhol and Clement Greenberg. Part of the snippet quoted from an exchange between Marcel Duchamp and Pierre Cabanne seemed particularly relevant to the spirit of her exhibition.

Neither belief nor judgment are among the resources available to the “Eighties perspective” that informs this exhibition, since both are presumably discredited relics of a white, Western, patriarchal system of repressive social relations. In fact, perhaps the saddest thing about “Culture and Commentary: An Eighties Perspective” is its subtitle: who could doubt it?