My friend Rob's latest 'blog entry on the "Splasher Manifesto," a collective cri de coeur put in print by marauding saboteurs of New York street art, highlights an interesting element in the crisis of artistic authenticity: The mechanisms of co-optation, having accelerated to near instantaneousness, have erected in people's minds fundamental presumptions as to the artist's now automatically suspect integrity.
This recently coined a priori of aesthetic judgment I find dismaying, because it threatens to make art impossible. It took quite a few years for Manet et al. to be absorbed into the canons of bourgeois taste (and Manet's ambitions were arguably bourgeois to begin with). Impressionist painting did enjoy brief middle years as strange, off-putting, unassimilable works. But today, such epater le bourgeois appears impossible, unless artists descend to shock — dung Madonnas, piss Christs, and what-not — and even this is doomed to failure. Perhaps the Splashers are heeding the immortal line from Fellini's 8 1/2, "Sometimes it's better to destroy than to create something unneccessary," a lesson that deviates from Schumpeter's economic doctrine of "creative destruction" in that the former exhorts entrepreneurs to destruction in order to create things that lack as much necessity as the things destroyed to make way for them.
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