This text may seem vulgar to professionals, but there is no other way to explain it so that it is clear to everyone. Sorry. I will speak about what is well known, simplify, and explain things on my fingers—well, one way or another, there is an opportunity to clarify, complicate, and expand in the comments. By the way, I am grateful for the questions and detailed comments, and if it comes to publishing these texts, the interesting questions and my answers to them will definitely be included.
This is not yet about the criteria themselves, but already about what happened to them. Generally, it is an amazing situation that at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, when the number of professional artists can be estimated at one million!!! The tool for evaluating artists—namely, the apparatus of criteria—is completely destroyed, and everything rests on such a cumbersome mechanism as consensus.
Let us take as a turning point the 60 years between the creation of the French Academy of Fine Arts (1803) and the Salon des Refusés (1863). Two fateful decisions of the French Academy: first, only works selected by a special jury of artists who were members of the Academy could enter the market. Second, the rotation of the Academy occurred only upon the death of one of the academicians.
The first decision was a revolution for art evaluation criteria. Now, art is evaluated not by the client, but by a peer. Art for art's sake. And you and I can easily combine the criteria that existed before that into one block. I don't know how to name it correctly, but I called it "classical" for myself. What is important is that these criteria did not contradict each other. Each of them was generated by a specific addressee at a certain time, but although their nature was different, they could coexist in a single work of art.
Everything is very clearly visible there from ancient Egypt to the French Revolution: the Church as a client expects mysticism and spirituality (Caravaggio’s works were rejected with the note "no divine spark"). The enlightened aristocracy sees the artist as a researcher of nature—so that the anatomy is correct, the perspective is sound, and the gaze looks alive. The bourgeoisie expects beauty—let the colors harmonize and please the eye. Royal houses want to immortalize themselves or historical events, expecting a lofty conversation from the artist.
Why, and most importantly, how did they manage to combine this? The fact is that the relationship between artists of different generations could be described as "continuity." Artists thought either in terms of "progress" (we develop the achievements of our predecessors and strive to surpass them) or in terms of a "golden age" (our predecessors achieved perfection, and we must approach them under new conditions). But in both cases, the art of the past was perceived exclusively as the foundation for the new art.
The emergence of the French Academy was very progressive at first. Artists saw and evaluated what was invisible to the clients. Later, in the text about criteria, I will highlight those that were born inside the guild. Academicism is a sharp leap in the general level. True, this leveled the differences between one academician and another. To this day, the term "academic drawing" implies a certain universal, depersonalized quality. Furthermore, the academy granted a high status to the practice of art, detaching the artist from other "craftsmen." But everyone knows what happened next. The academicians, lacking rotation, grew old and conservative, resulting in the second important event—the Salon des Refusés.
For the story of criteria, the main thing is that for the first time, new artists declared that their predecessors were not great titans whose art the new ones were developing, but backward, outdated, senile men, and that the new art would be created in opposition to the old. The new system of criteria born in the arguments of artists—not within the walls of the academy, but in cafes—quickly won the love of artists and then the public, and everything would have been fine, but after a while, history repeated itself. Newest artists appeared, who began the overthrow of the overthrowers and the denial of their criteria, which were new yesterday but old today. The era of Modernism began.
The era of Modernism was not just a rapid shift of paradigms in art—that is, the replacement of one system of criteria with another. What is more important in this case is that the new system of criteria always pushed off from the previous one, insisted on fundamental differences, and "overthrew" it. Later, the symbol of this process became Rauschenberg's gesture, who literally erased a drawing by De Kooning, showing that new artists came not to continue the work of the previous generation, but to destroy it.
But since the "new" quite quickly—before the eyes of a single viewer—became "old" and was replaced by the "newest," everyone already knew that this newest would also soon be rejected, and that any system of criteria was no longer a well-founded building for art history, volume after volume, but merely a manifesto, a wish of the artist as to how he would like the viewer to look at his art.
If we observe this process from a supra-discursive perspective, we can say that starting from the Salon des Refusés and for a hundred years, one of the criteria—namely, "novelty"—pushed the rest into the background. As a result, at the moment when the impossibility of the "new" became commonplace, there simply were no other criteria left.
By the way, many artists perceived this situation as a form of absolute freedom for the manifestation of individuality. For example, Andrei Roiter very accurately named his exhibition: "My Profession is to Be Andrei Roiter." But looking at his works, you will discover a fairly coherent artistic system, which became the source of the artist's success. It is no less strict than the church canons for icons. The only difference is that this is not an external frame handed down from above, but his own, developed as a result of a personal quest. One way or another, this entire discourse connecting a work of art with the figure of the artist, his social status, inner world, and sexuality began as a response to the disappearance of criteria.
Looking ahead, I want to say that in my opinion, just as Fukuyama prematurely announced the end of history and the "definitive victory of liberalism," a situation of the inevitability of the emergence of something new has developed in art by 2025.
True, temporality has disappeared—the exact correspondence of a certain movement in art to a specific time. Art today is not a long row of volumes on a bookshelf—where you close the volume of the first half of the 18th century and open the next volume of the second half of the 18th century—but a cultural landscape in which everything is simultaneously present.
Contemporary art inherits the temporality of Modernism only in a certain sense and contains no distinctive features. Few have noticed a crucial fact: in this situation, the concept of "derivativeness" (second-hand nature), which thirty years ago was a bogeyman for all post-Soviet art, has disappeared.
I consider the cancellation of derivativeness to be one of the real achievements of the anti-colonial movement. Each country, continent—Kazakhstan, Moldova, African countries—has the right to its own heroic era of Modernism, and the fact that it happened 50–70 years later does not invalidate it.
But let us return to criteria. The era of Modernism is an era of manifestos containing criteria by which artists invited the public to evaluate them. The artist became not only the author of a work but also the builder of his own concept of art. Not everyone formulated it themselves, but everyone had to choose. To align. That is, unlike classical criteria, which were associated with the primary client, modernist criteria were formulated by the artists. And this second group of criteria does not form a cohesive whole. You have to choose: either/or...
It must be said that for the public, especially collectors, this situation was frustrating. Bereft of criteria, the public needed at least some crutches—some tools to help with evaluation, yet external to the artists.
Criticism, which turned into a separate "institution of power," became such a tool. I will write a separate text about the institution of criticism and about artists' attempts to escape its power. But looking ahead, I will say that critics formed a third body of criteria: the "contextual" one.
P.S. I took the criticism to heart and will not use my texts so obtrusively to advertise the Nuclear project. Today we are promoting Vladimir Sorokin's exhibition, which opens tomorrow in Belgrade: Dostoevsky-Trip. Vladimir Sorokin personal exhibition.
