In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing a sentence like this appear in my favorite art magazine: “After the installation of ‘North, East, South, West,’ his crowd-pleasing series of steel-clad giant geometric holes in the floor at the newly opened DIA:Beacon museum an hour upriver from Manhattan, sculptor and earthworker Michael Heizer jumped to No. 13 in the ATPA (Association of Touring Professional Artists) rankings.” I’d order another beer at Fanelli’s in SoHo and growl to the guy on the stool next to me, “Yeah, well Bruce Nauman will kill ’em next summer on the European circuit.”
But we’ve really got to put a stop to this “greatest of his generation” thing.
Most critics disguise that phrase as a “fact” of generally held opinion. Try dance critic R. M. Campbell in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Russian dancer Olga Spessivtzeva, who has been called ’the greatest Romantic ballerina of her generation …’” Or film critic Stephen Witty in The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.): “Arguably the greatest of a great generation of Italian filmmakers, Federico Fellini …” Or Karla Briggs in The Oregonian: “Ron Carter, who has been called the greatest bass player of his generation …” Others cite a specific source. For example, Christopher Lehman in Slate ("[James] Frey announced that he was aiming to be the ‘greatest writer of my generation’ …") and Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times of London (“At last [Kristin Scott Thomas] has formally become a great actress–one of the greatest of her generation, according to Hollywood boss Harvey Weinstein”).
But frequently you get the unapologetic real thing, such as Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, saying of sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney: “I decided he was the most important American artist of his generation.” (Kimmelman gilded that opinion by writing in February, “After going to the [Barney’s recent show at the] Guggenheim, I want to amend the remark now: Hands down, he is, at just shy of 36, the most compelling, richly imaginative artist to emerge in years.”) On April 3, Kimmelman went out to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to give a lecture about the entire roster of Heizer-age guys on view at DIA:Beacon. He titled the talk “Out of the Box: America’s Greatest Generation of Artists and the American Dream.”
What’s so wrong with that? Well, first off, “generation” is a hedge. If Kimmelman said that Matthew Barney was “the most important American artist”–which is itself a hedge on “the best artist”–of the 1990s, readers would start to riffle through their mental art diaries and think, “Wait a minute, didn’t Nauman have a great decade? And wasn’t Richard Serra still damned near dominant? Isn’t Jeff Koons a much bigger influence on younger artists? What about Ann Hamilton and all that poetic installation art that she’s the grande dame of?” The qualifier “generation” conveniently limits the field to artists who were in their mid-20s to early 30s during the 1990s. (Barney’s too young to have done anything significant before then and our new century is barely underway.) But the label “the most important American artist under 35 during the 1990s” doesn’t exactly set your heart aflutter, does it?
Then there’s the problem of just what constitutes a generation in the art world. My maternal grandmother was born in the late 1880s. My late mother was born in 1911. I was born in 1941. And my son was born in 1965. That’s four biological generations, c. 1888-1965. During that same time in art history, however, you had the impressionists, the post-impressionists, the cubists, the orphic (abstract) cubists, the abstract branch of the surrealists, the abstract expressionists, the color-field painters, the minimalists and the beginnings of the postminimalists and conceptual art. That’s 10 “generations,” not including such subdivisions as “second-generation abstract expressionist” and completely leaving out a whole parallel strain of modern art from the dadaists through the pop artists to people like Koons. In the still irredeemably Gotham-centric and clique-ridden American art world, “generation” can mean an artist and his classmates from one particular session of the star-making Yale Summer School at Norfolk who came down to New York to set up their studios at around the same time.
Most of all, though, a critic’s pronouncing somebody “the greatest/most-important sculptor/bassoonist/director/novelist/cheesemaker/whatever of his generation” says much more about the critic than the anointed artist. It says that the critic has reached a state of fatigue and impatience with taking forward-looking, right-now judgmental chances on quirky 25-year-olds who probably won’t pan out over the long haul, making the critic look misguided. It says that the critic is more comfortable looking backward. It says the critic has reached a plateau of self-importance on which he wants to go around conferring cultural knighthoods on artist-commoners who’ve managed to rise above their making-clever-baubles-for-the-rich stations to become, almost, big thinkers. (The critic gently lowers the blade of his connoisseur’s broadsword and intones, “I hereby deem thee the greatest of thy generation.”) And it says that the critic wants to get the authoritative-sounding but actually sonorously empty words “greatest” and “generation” together in the same sentence.
What’s so scary and crude, I ask, about picking a specific bracket of dates (instead of invoking the slippery “generation”) and saying “best” or “third-best” or, indeed, “No. 13” (instead of the History Channelish “greatest”)? Enough with this greatest-of-his-generation stuff! (Note to feminists: The preponderance of masculine pronouns, above, is not the product of chauvinist bias, but rather the result of the realization that my female colleagues don’t go in for handing out gold medals in art. It’s pretty much a guy thing.)
Now, I freely admit I’ve made my own share–maybe more–of similar pronouncements (sometimes in so many words) in the past, and the only reason I don’t drag the embarrassing examples out into the light of day of this essay is that it’s simply too painful to go back through the C: drive and fish out all the specific malfeasances. Messrs. Witty, Appleyard and Kimmelman have, however, done me the favor of compelling me to retake the pledge. As to pronouncing artists to be “the greatest of their generation”–I’ll stop if you will.
