From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
21st Century Art
Makes Its Escape
From the Toilet
We don't need Modernism and Post-Modernism anymore.
Depicted elsewhere in this column you will find Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," a ready-made urinal he posited as art in 1917 and which a December 2004 poll of 500 arts specialists in Britain said was the single most important work of art in the 20th century. Since this assertion appeared, it has taken up residence in that part of my mind reserved for persistent obsessions. Not Picasso's "Guernica" (it came in fourth), but Duchamp's urinal.
And so on a recent European trip that began in London, I traipsed across a Millennium Bridge swept by wind and rain to bear doubting witness to the century's most important creation, Duchamp's urinal, which sits inside a plastic case at the Tate Modern museum. The 20th century's most famous pissoir remains unsettling to see in a museum, as Duchamp intended. He signed it "R. Mutt."
For the sake of argument, I am willing to agree that Duchamp's urinal was the most influential artwork of the past century. If this is even close to being true, we may declare the modern art movement dead.
Why? For one reason: It is inappropriate to the age in which we live. It is time for both Modernism and Post-Modernism to go away. The 20th century is over. We don't need it anymore. We don't want it anymore.
What we need is an art, a culture, an aesthetic appropriate to the age in which we live--the 21st century, the Age of the Digital and the Age of September 11. Modern art isn't it.
Modernism was a reaction to the industrial age or the machine age. It produced Cubism, Stravinsky's music and James Joyce's "Ulysses" (also voted the 20th century's most important novel by a panel of the Modern Library). Its most important cultural values included discordance, challenge, collision, violation, confusion. This is wholly out of sync with what people want or need in the current age.
To see what our age needs, go to Rome. Rome was the next leg on my European trip--six days of swimming across the church façades of Borromini and Bramante (whose architecture originated in what he discovered in the ancient Roman ruins), the garden frescoes from Augustan villas on the walls of the Palazzo Massimo, the mammoth marble raiment on Bernini's tomb for Pope Alexander VII in St. Peter's.
The 21st-century need that one finds here is not merely beauty. Beauty still sits in the eye of the beholder, and the 20th century produced much that is beautiful. What one finds in Rome are the aesthetic values of the High Renaissance--proportion, harmony and balance. What that produces--so different than Duchamp's influence--is what we need: Respite.
Why respite? Because whatever else the computer age has given us--and it is often compelling, powerful and productive--it is not pleasant. It is unprecedentedly fast, even frantic; it is relentless. The price of digitilization's information and fun is frustration; it always needs to be rebooted or relearned. Compared to the fast-forward pace at which we live, the machine-age pressures the Modernists reacted to now look like a walk in Seurat's park.
Google, Web surfing, cell phones and 1,000 television channels have also brought us something other than "Grand Theft Auto" and Britney-on-demand. Everyone in the world watched the second World Trade Center tower fall in real time, and will do so the next time. The world we inhabit now is Iraq, Sudan, tsunami, weapons of mass destruction, Rwanda, Bosnia, Beslan. Knowing--and seeing with our own eyes--so much that is so bad is not normal. We don't need to be shocked by art. We now live in a constant state of shock.
We cannot hide from the world as it is, and should not. But we need respite. And sometimes we need solace.
I do not think that an art appropriate to the age of the microchip is likely to look like the grand façades of Borromini. It probably will look more like . . . the iPod.
Apple sold more than 4.5 million iPods in the final three months last year. The iPod, for better or worse, may be our Duchampian icon, the most important cultural signifier of an age just aborning. It's beautiful. Its lines are pleasing. It is even the color of classical sculpture. It is also very isolating.
iPodian escape, though defensible, would not be my choice as the defining value of the next 100 years of culture. But who knows where we are going? The iPod enables contemplation--a worthy act--of just one thing, music. Perhaps there is a young architect even now struggling to design an affordable iPod house, which will provide workers on microchip schedules visual and auditory delight, as the old masters of proportional tranquility did for their patrons.
If I cannot predict the substance of what is likely to come from our new cultural icon, I'm inclined to believe it will offer pleasures closer to Mr. Borromini's tastes than what flowed after Mr. Duchamp's urinal.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
