abvg,

Thank you for the fine reply to my somewhat awkward stab at furthering the discussion over "The Death of Painting/Autonomous Art".

I'm glad if I said something which gives you "some measure of hope". I do agree with your conclusion that "it is within us to answer these questions". But I'm also convinced that if we artists neglect certain unpleasant problems lodged at the center of our culture due to feelings of apathy or impotence (or because it's "in" to be uncritical, or because it's "all too difficult to think about", or because we think it's better to just work and hope for the best, etc.), these problems will end up being solved for us ("over our heads", so to speak). Culture, naturally, is not art, but the "made", wholly artificial public environment whose conditions effect whether art is born to begin with, lives a "normal, healthy lifespan", or dies a premature death. The concept of Autonomous Art indigenous to western bourgeois culture - which evolved out of the need to address the contradictions within that culture - is threatened with extinction. Autonomous Art - for which the postmodern offers no replacement -took a very long time to develop and remains, finally, all we have (it's recent "deconstruction" notwithstanding). Whether one considers this threat to be the outcome of a "conspiracy" is a question I'd prefer to bring up later. (For one of the most important defenses of Autonomous Art written during the 20th century, one should read the essay "Art in the Light of Conscience" by the poet Marina Tsvetaeva.) In the main, however, I don't believe for a moment that art "sells itself" (unless I misunderstand your formulation), is "co-opted" or "sold-out"; rather, that individual artists sell themselves out, are the ones who co-opt themselves down the proverbial river - to the extreme of betraying those among their fellow artists less inclined toward self-prostitution, perhaps the least attractive facet of our vocation during the last century. We've thus become the heirs to a vast artistic "silent majority", a condition I consider(and I'm not entirely alone here) a profoundly dangerous political situation. The first step in the opposite direction is to break the silence. I hope this is what we're doing here - instead of quibbling over art historical/critical terminology and period-dating.

I freely concede that Pop Art (having lived through the Pop Art era, I try to forget it most of the time) had one foot in the modern, the other in what came to be seen as the postmodern. When I "equated" the postmodern with post WW II, I was neither thinking about practice preceding theory nor especially interested in establishing yet another historical/critical dating scheme for Postmodernism. (Anyway, when one sets up abstract systems based upon linear progress-in-time, something or other will inevitably fail to pass neatly into the concept: such systems are usually arbitrary.) Nevertheless, I hold to my contention that the postmodern is post WW II for the simple reason that my overall perspective is "cultural critical" - as distinguished from whatever might be associated with the art historical/critical intellectual preserve. (I'm sorry if I failed to make this clear in the beginning.) As for "later" manifestations of the postmodern continuing into the present,

"...this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror." (Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", 1984)

I cannot share your opinion that postmodern theory is "essentially a fraud" - especially with regard to Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson (unless you happen to be talking about someone else) -although I can understand your mistrust from a broader view.

Your quote from W.J.T. Mitchell bearing upon the current hegemony of socio-political text was well chosen (although I'd like to stay away from Enwezor and Documenta 11 for the present). In response to the Mitchell quote, I'd like to offer a quote to one of my most favored art essayists, the composer Morton Feldman:

"Just as the Germans killed music, the French killed painting by bringing into it the literary clarity which had produced a Stendhal - whose motto, you will remember, was 'To be clear at all costs.' But in painting you cannot decide a priori what is going to be clear. That's why Fragonard, who aimed at an artistic rightness, looks so much more rediculous than Delacroix, who has the whole literary apparatus holding him up. One has only to look at a Delacroix to see that ideas are literally holding the painting together!

I have always thought this reliance on the literary arose quite naturally out of European culture, in the constant pull between the religious and the aesthetical. The aesthetical, of course, is traditionally defensive because of the religious. Painting, literature, none of the arts could deal with abstract thought, could be conceived of abstractly; they had to present ideas with which to fight this other idea.

To understand Cézanne, we must realize that if he was not of his own time, neither was he really of ours. He is understood too much by his influence. In essence, his idea is directly opposed to that of the modernist. With Cézanne, it is always how he SEES that determines how he thinks, whereas the modernist, on the other hand, has changed perception by way of the conceptual.