The State of American Art: A Quarter Century of Decline? | Art in the Digital Age, Social Media, and the Loss of Reverence

Say you were stopped on the street, and someone asked you to name an American artist, one or more who is a household name regardless of whether or not you can picture even a single piece of their art (although that’s doubtful in most cases), I think that most Americans, probably more than can name a single local politician, would be able to acknowledge at least one artist. What are the chances that your American artist became prominent in the last twenty-four years since the beginning of the millennium?  

            During the early to mid-20^th century, the art scene in the United States underwent a significant transformation with the emergence of various art movements that shaped the country’s cultural landscape. Notable artists such as Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring, Georgia O’Keefe, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were reimagining art in a post-modern, neo-expressionism likeness and finding a balance between raw personal emotion and cultural activism, speaking out against the duplicity of McDonaldization: neo-Americanism.

These postmodern, neo-expressionist artist discovered their voice in the foundations of realist, landscape, and modern artists such as Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Mary Cassatt, Grant Wood, Winslow Homer, Augusta Savage, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Jacob Lawrence, and Milton Avery. The American artist, centuries behind European, Asian, and African precedence, exploded into the art scene with reverent force, and the names of American artists were overheard on streets and in local businesses, in schools and libraries, cafés and bars, there was a presence to these beloved figures.

          However, with the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in ’87 and ’88 (respectively), the reverence of artists being household names died along with them. A new ideology, seeded around the beginning of the millennium, allowed everyone to be an artist; explore who you are, and your art will follow. It introduced a new reality with the birth of another new reality, the internet age: the age of smartphones, social media, and blamelessness, along with the twisted direction of blameless social networking a new, everyman style of post-romanticism, post-expressionism art followed. Suddenly everyone was an artist, and so no one was.

            In the past two decades, art in the United States has continued to evolve, influenced by technological advancements, globalization, and changing societal norms. With the rise of social media and digital platforms, art has become more accessible to a wider audience, enabling artists to showcase their work globally. This shift has led to a democratization of art appreciation, allowing diverse voices and perspectives to be heard and celebrated. On the one hand, this is of course, and in theory a benefit to the world, and yet, with the growing opportunity for the voices of everyone to be heard most were sharing with the world not the beloved raw expression of self we cherished in Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jackson Pollock but instead the expression of an invented image of the tortured artist.

You don’t want me, you want this image of me; I think you want me to be, Bob Dylan, the musician; Jack Kerouac, the writer; Jean-Michel Basquiat, the painter; Byron, the poet; and, James Dean, the actor, and we didn’t want to be any one of our tormented masters, no, we were destined to be all of them: the musician, the writer, the painter, the poet, and the actor (well, maybe not the actor “f$&k actors [summarily]”), but we didn’t have anything to say that we hadn’t already said on Twitter and weren’t checking every few minutes to soothe out attention addictions, so we tied strings to cigarette butts, recreated stylistically plain soup cans, and manufactured strained political statements on T-shirts.

          A tiny handful of us might know the names Jeff Koons, JonOne, and Shepard Fairey, and we might “Like” anonymous paintings and mixed media that are trending today and are forgotten tomorrow, but where are the masters, the artists who scribble their crest in their work, easter eggs of recognition like a crown carved into the niches of history? What happened to our artists, mentors, role models, and examples of fulfillment? The household names of respected crafts-persons have all but been forgotten because reverence has been lost to the weaves of social resentment, we are all equal in our un-exceptionalism. A quarter of a century is a long time to go without artistic reverence and how our culture is poorer for it is not something that I’m excited to find out.