The big idea: should we abolish art?

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Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? And if you don’t go to a gallery, maybe you’ll find yourself lingering on a picture at home, reading a novel, going to the theatre or listening to music. But what if you didn’t? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art?

The impulse seems philistine at best, authoritarian at worst, yet a remarkable number of modern artists were seduced by it. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, repeatedly called for the end of literature. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the De Stijl movement, proclaimed that “art has poisoned our life”, while his friend and compatriot, Piet Mondrian, believed that if we did abolish art, no one would miss it. In December 1914, as the first world war entered its first winter, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared that art was already dead. “It found itself in the backwater of life,” he wrote. “It was soft and could not defend itself.”

These points of view were rooted in a historical moment, particularly in the shock and disillusionment occasioned by the war, yet it’s easy to see resonances in our own time. Many back then had a distrust of culture that was elite in the wrong way: expensive, inaccessible, obscure. If you’ve been to an art fair recently, you’ll notice that this kind of art is in rude health. Characters such as Mondrian and Van Doesburg wished not to abolish creation or self-expression – but to break art out of its frame, to transfigure our whole environment so there would be no distinction between art and ordinary objects. The rise of modern design has perhaps brought us closer to that goal, yet Mondrian hoped that his own style, with its distinctive primary colors and geometric planes, would form the basis for a single, universal, anonymous language of design, and instead it has degenerated into Mondrian-kitsch, to be found on everything from socks to aprons. It seems as if we like designers more than design.

The most intriguing of those old impulses to abandon art derived from suspicion of an art that was empathetic and humanistic. During the war, Breton had worked as a psychiatrist tending to traumatised soldiers, and these experiences made him wary of any art that might attempt to redeem all the horror they had witnessed. If the world was wretched, shouldn’t we be transforming it, not distracting ourselves from it? Yet for most of us, that’s precisely the role art plays in our lives. If you’ve had a bad week at work, you relax with art. It blunts your ire, and by Monday you’re ready for the boss again. But what would happen if we didn’t soothe ourselves with imagined utopias, but instead did as John Lydon once suggested, and used anger as an energy?

It should be obvious that these early calls to end art didn’t achieve their goals. Mondrian talked the talk about art’s end, but his love of painting made him equivocate, and eventually he blamed society for being ill-prepared for his brave new artless world. Also, the proposed alternatives weren’t always so viable. Among several ideas, Breton suggested walking in the city as a new form of poetic activity. He felt that a disjunctive kind of verse, a collage of sights and signs and feelings, would emerge from the chance encounters and lateral thoughts occasioned by a walk. Maybe it would if you were strolling through the historic parts of Paris in the 1920s, but when I tried wandering at random around my own neighbourhood in an outer borough of New York City, I found my “poems” were banal and forlorn. I struggled to disengage from thoughts of goals and destinations, and crossing the busy street posed its own risks. I concluded that we partition our lives for a reason: we rationalise to get stuff done, we fantasise to relax. In other words, art and life don’t mix.

Recent developments suggest that artists agree. After a flurry of attempts to democratise art in the 1960s, things have quieted somewhat, and like a young radical entering middle age, art has grown conservative. While once we wanted avant-garde performance, or sculpture made of documents or heaps of dirt, today patrons want portraits once again. There’s much to be said for the notion that art should consist of beautiful objects. In a world that is increasingly digital, dematerialised and accelerated, the pleasures of pausing and looking at something exquisite help us slow down and rest in the moment. Yet to accept that this is all art should aspire to is to accept that a whole realm of human creation devoted to beauty, thought and feeling will be confined to the boundaries of a picture frame or a plinth, and sold to the highest bidder. That is the sorry spectacle on show at most art fairs today, in which prestige attaches not to the experience of beauty, nor to public discourse about it, but merely to the acquisition of expensive trophies.

So while calling for the end of art can sound like a mantra for hare-brained radicals or philosophers and obscurantists, believing in its possibility can help us see the world anew, and puts us in distinguished company. We tell ourselves that an everyday experience, no matter how odd and arresting, can never be the highest art – but André Breton thought it could. We tell ourselves that the colours we paint on walls at home can never be art, no matter how much pleasure they give us – but Piet Mondrian thought they could. Instead, we accept defeat, and tell ourselves that art is something that only someone else has the privilege to own. Keep the creativity; these are the attitudes we ought to abolish.

Morgan Falconer is the author of How to Be Avant-Garde (WW Norton).

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