Where Have All the Artists Gone?: The State of American Art - A Quarter Century of Decline

Say you were stopped on the street and asked to name an American artist, someone whose name is a household fixture, even if you can’t picture a single piece of their work (though that’s doubtful in most cases). I suspect most Americans, probably more than can name a single local politician, could acknowledge at least one. But what are the chances that your artist rose to prominence in the last twenty-four years?

During the early to mid-20th century, the American art scene underwent a seismic transformation. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat reimagined art in a postmodern, neo-expressionist likeness, balancing raw personal emotion with cultural activism. They spoke out against the duplicity of McDonaldization, against the flattening of identity into a commodity. They were not just artists, they were voices.

These artists found their footing in the foundations laid by realist, landscape, and modern predecessors, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Mary Cassatt, Grant Wood, Winslow Homer, Augusta Savage, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Jacob Lawrence, and Milton Avery. American art, centuries behind its European, Asian, and African counterparts, exploded into the cultural landscape with reverent force. Their names were overheard in cafés, classrooms, libraries, and bars. They were present.

With the deaths of Warhol and Basquiat in ’87 and ’88, something shifted. Reverence died with them. Around the turn of the millennium, a new ideology emerged: everyone is an artist. Explore who you are, and your art will follow. It was a beautiful idea, until it wasn’t. The internet age arrived, smartphones, social media, and the cult of blamelessness. A new, everyman style of post-romanticism, post-expressionism took hold. Suddenly, everyone was an artist, and so no one was.

Over the past two decades, American art has continued to evolve, shaped by technology, globalization, and shifting norms. Social media has made art more accessible, enabling artists to showcase their work globally. In theory, this democratization was a gift. Diverse voices could be heard. But in practice, many shared not the raw expression of self we cherished in Basquiat and Pollock, but the curated image of the tortured artist. We weren’t exposed to the expression of self; we were exposed to the interpretation of one’s favorite artist as a projection of self.

“I don’t want to show you me; I want to show you the image of Basquiat through me.” You want me to be Bob Dylan, the musician; Jack Kerouac, the writer; Basquiat, the painter; Byron, the poet; James Dean, the actor. And we didn’t want to be any one of our tormented masters—we wanted to be all of them: the musician, the writer, the painter, the poet, the actor. But we had nothing to say that we hadn’t already said on Twitter. We were checking every few minutes to soothe our attention addictions. So, we tied strings to cigarette butts, recreated stylistically plain soup cans, and printed strained political statements on T-shirts.

A tiny handful of us might know the names Jeff Koons, JonOne, and Shepard Fairey. We might “Like” anonymous paintings and mixed media that trend today and vanish tomorrow. But where are the masters? The artists who scribble their crest into their work, easter eggs of recognition, crowns carved into the niches of history? What happened to our mentors, our role models, our examples of fulfillment? The household names of respected craftspeople have all but disappeared. Reverence has been lost to the weaves of social resentment. We are all equal in our unexceptionalism. A quarter of a century is a long time to go without artistic reverence. And how poor our culture is, for it is not something I’m excited to find out.