"The cult of the avant-garde artist" by Donald Kuspit (CUP, 1993)

It concerns the artist's role in society - how the maladies of each affects the other - and the artist's use of past art. Duchamp, Mondrian, Warhol, Beuys, Schnabel, etc. 113 pages followed by 57 pages of notes.

Compressing the main points below - the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, influencing his public's perception of that art. The postmoderns are backward-looking social reactionaries, mocking innovation by turning the new into a cliché. Fame is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure.

• "These, then, are the basic articles of faith in the avant-garde artist: he is more spontaneous - primordially expressive - than anyone else because he is more absolutely integrated than anyone else, and he can experience in a more primordial way than other people because his sense perception is not bound by symbolic functioning ... To put this in Whiteheadean language, it is because the artist does not accept society's symbol systems that he is able to sense with unusual directness what is fundamental" (p.7)
• "In its decadent appropriation of avant-garde art, the neo-avant-garde is narcissistic, however much the avant-garde art produced under the auspices of the idea of art for art's sake seems to be narcissistic as well. If art for art's sake implies narcissism, it is secondary or defensive narcissism, rather than the consummate, cynical, self-celebratory narricism of neo-avant-garde art" (p.8)
• "Fear of decadence and the wish for rejuvenation haunt - indeed, terrorize - modern thinking about art" (p.9)
• "The artist is able to revive the decadent audience's will to live" (p.11)
• "The artist's deliberate will to create art stops the drift to decadence, and the advance of art embodies the reversal of this drift" [Nietzsche] (p.11)
• "unless art is made for an audience in desperate need of transfiguration, of control over the chaos in itself, of form, then art is merely the expression of vanity" [Nietzsche] (p.12)
• "Until the present state of postmodernist disillusionment, belief in art's profound healing power ... was the cornerstone of belief in avant-garde art" (p.12)
• "[postmodernism] exploits its audience's susceptibility to art, its unconscious hope for transfiguration by art, but offers little in return" (p.12)
• "Art today has reached a new extreme of decadence, in which it dialectically incorporates all the past signs of artistic rejuvenation ... while denying their contemporary possibility" (p.13)
• "For the neo-avant-garde artist, the avant-garde past is not a land of milk and honey, but a desert with half-buried, broken, dubious treasures, to be excavated with ironic curiosity. He incorporates these fragments in his art the way medieval church builders subsumed the stones of ancient temples, and thus the gods these housed" (p.16)
• "Avant-garde art climaxes in the belief that every member of society can be an innovator, that is, can transform himself through the therapeutic practice of art, from a wounded decadent into a healthy Overman" (p.19)
• "[The neo-avant-garde artist] restablishes the traditional, easy reciprocity between society and artist denied by the avant-garde artist and destroyed through his self-imposed ostracization ... A major symptom of this new artistic worldliness is the explicit use of artistic innovation to win fame and fortune" (p.20)
• "modern art's manneristic "fondness for far-fetched connections," [] in fact acknowledges profound disconnection" (p.22)
• "The basic contention of this book is that the avant-garde artist makes his art to restore himself to health, an intention that not only informs his art but influences his public's perception of that art" (p.28)
• "Fame, we might say, is narcissistic compensation for therapeutic failure" (p.28)
• "Avant-garde art, as I have suggested, involves a wish to regress to the primordial beginning to escape the decadent end" (p.29)
• "avant-garde art's melting forms are simultaneously symptoms of disintegration anxiety and indications of a process of creative reintegration of the self. The notion of "breakthrough" conveys this double meaning" (p.29)
• "Fame is a provocative trap and distorting mirror - ironically, like the artists' objects" (p.35)
• "many modern artists turned to distortion as the promised land of primordial creativity ... These artists are less creative - less astoundingly original - than they think" (p.42)
• "Traditional society was protected from the sense of decadence by belief in the meaningfulness of transcendence, embodied in religion. Abstract art re-embodied it for modern society, which is one reason the first abstract artists felt imbued with a sense of religious mission" (p.56)
• "the geometricist is also schizoid: his geometry is an intellectual defense against the frustration of empty feeling (against which the expressivist has no defense at all ... Like many i, the abstract artist is acutely sensitive to his own inner processes, but he is insensitive to - indeed, cut off from - those of others" (p.59)
• ""total spontaneity of expression," as Breton said, is the most direct avenue to the primordial unconscious ... Both the surrealists and expressionists want to make art spontaneously. The former seem to think one can learn to do so" (p.60)
• "Where the modernists were forward-looking psychic revolutionaries, the postmoderns are backward-looking social reactionaries, even if they have ironic insight into the status quo of art and the society" (p.66)
• "disbelief in art's therapeutic power defines post-avant-garde art, which mocks innovation by turning the new into a cliché" (p.66)
• "[Beuys'] shamanism was an attempt to bring the human and scientific together again, as in primordial art" (p.91)
• "Hitler was a failed artist, and Beuys, it should be recalled, was a successful politician, a founder of the Green Party" (p.91)
• "Beuys is the grand climax of a long line of self-contradictory avant-garde narcissists in conflict with a society they want as their audience" (p.98)
• "The real tragedy of the avant-garde artist is that he wants to heal a society that has a vested ironic interest in his pathology" (p.98)
• "Appropriation art is informed by the decadence syndrome: the sense of the decline and impending death of art" (p.106)
• "Art is indeed a confidence game in that it gives the audience confidence in itself. This is why the audience rewards the artist with fame and fortune, giving him, in turn, confidence in the significance of his creativity. Art fuses artist and audience in a mutual narcissism" (p.111)