Art Reboot

68 world’s attention, and advanced the debate about art and the human condition. But, as Tom Wolfe points out in The Painted Word , the art world of mid-century New York was tiny, consisting of a group of artists; a few focal locations, rich patrons and curators; and a handful of critics who explained to the benighted what it was all about. And although abstract expressionism had caught the attention of the press, some big museums and a major patron or two, its power was cultural; the public wasn’t actually buying the stuff at the time. We all assumed that Pollock was flog- ging paintings hand-over-fist hot off his paint-streaked garage floor, but he wasn’t. He was struggling to sell his works even as he was being deified by the art world. Most people still liked subject matter in their art, hence the appearance of the next Ism to take the art world by storm, one which people did buy: pop art. Pop art made subject matter acceptable again, as long as it was ironic and drawn from authentic sources such as a supermarket shelf or a comic book. It could be seen as flipping the required finger at the old order, which by then, in the ever-shifting turmoil of revolution, came to include abstract expressionism! Wolfe also discusses flatness. We rejected the illusory depic- tion of three-dimensional life on a two-dimensional plane, dev- eloped to a high level of sophistication in the Renaissance, as being inauthentic, bourgeois, false to the materials (let paint be paint). The new prize was the flatness of the picture plane, which itself became the ‘subject’ of painting, as in Jasper Johns’ flags and targets: flat things shown as flat paintings, albeit using deliciously textured encaustic. Perhaps not even ‘shown’; the painting was not a representation of a flat target; it was a flat target. No distance