The unraveling of modernism has been dated to 1966, the year paintings no longer seemed capable of finishing within their frames. Or so says Rosalind Krauss, who was struck by the appearance that year of Stella's Wolfboro series and Noland's diamond-shaped paintings, and especially the degree to which both artists prioritized the series of paintings on display over and above any one painting in particular. In the same Artforum article in which she described the modernist dialectic as "a series of rooms en filade," Krauss also detected a threat now posed by the series, a threat to one of the most crucial properties of the modernist artwork--what Krauss described as its "singleness" or "wholeness-of-aspect," or what Fried termed "presentness" and Greenberg had been calling "at-onceness." It was the threat of the allover. As Krauss recalled encountering the Wolfboro suite, "In front of any one of them, I felt somehow that I was seeing less than the whole painting." The problem, she reasoned, was fairly basic: "If a work's meaning depends on comparison with things that exist outside it, then that meaning cannot be seen to be entirely present in the perception of the single work.... A series simply is diachronic in character--the experience of it is entirely temporal." Instead of dialectics, Krauss now sees diachronics; instead of each painting telescoping past into present, at once eclipsing, absorbing and summarizing its history into the present instance, now the modernist artwork spreads out, its variations stand shoulder to shoulder in a given sequence of "one thing after another." Modernist paintings now point toward other paintings as their context, precisely because they seem no longer able to internalize those other paintings, to make them into their content. As Krauss concludes, "The felt transparency between past and present has become silted up, so that the image no longer contains the terms of its past...both the past and the problem [it poses for the present work] are felt to reside outside it, and access to them can only be achieved by a long chain of explanation which characteristically takes the form of a narrative."²⁰

For Krauss, this is a pivotal moment marking the transition from modernism to the more "expanded field" of postmodernism. And of course, the complaint often lodged against postmodern art is that it gave too much of itself over to long chains of explanation, to trafficking in the right discursive references, appropriating conventions of technique or iconography only as signs whose value derived from prominent professional discussions. According to Hal Foster, "In the middle to late 1970s...theoretical production became as important as artistic production. ...Critical theory served as a secret continuation of modernism by other means...it occupied the position of high art, at least to the extent that it retained such values as difficulty and distinction." Or as Laura Owens put it in a 1996 issue of Artforum, "The references became more interesting than the painting."²¹

Sometime during the later half of the 1970s discourse became the dominant medium in art. Which shouldn't be too surprising, given the general postwar shift of cultural capital away from fine art objets to advanced informational techniques (or from literature to theory). But despite Foster's claim that theory filled the breach to safeguard "values of difficulty and distinction" and the "position of high art," this tighter allegiance with academia couldn't entirely restore a focus and frame, couldn't stop art's atomization and spread, couldn't fulfill those critical functions Buchloh named--"to identify and control, measure and validate, form canons and criteria." With the dissolution of boundaries and canons and the blurring of art and life, what could be appropriated by critical theory as its proper object spread as well. There seemed to be discourses allover. "The horizontal expansion of art has placed an enormous burden on artists and viewers alike," Foster continues. "As one moves from project to project, one must learn the discursive breadth as well as the historical depth of many different representations--like an anthropologist who enters a new culture with each new exhibition."²²

The pervasive sense that artworks rely on chains of explanation residing outside themselves, that they are a sub-species of theory, that they depend for their legibility and legitimacy on discourse, that they are most fully revealed in books and magazines, in the dual-slide-projector lectures of classrooms and artist talks, in informed discussions among artworld insiders, did much to erode conviction in the single, framed, all-there-at-once image. The readymade was made to exemplify this: that meaning in art is contingent, it comes after the fact and from outside in the form of a caption, a framing language, or a framing institution and ideology. But what happens to such meanings, and to discourse itself, when contextual determinants are in turn exploded, when every context reveals itself to be just another text, when framing institutions merge, diversify, cross-merchandize, when all disciplines feather into one another, when every caption is constructed from an information glut that can be endlessly edited, reorganized, manipulated, spun? Captions and contexts have lost all credibility, and the dissolution of these and every other frame has given rise to an infinitely landscaped situation, an awareness of only pure flow. Hence perhaps the popularity of landscaped, interior-décor art, big installations and video projections and other types of spread-out work. Every era has a dominant art that other forms imitate, to paraphrase Greenberg.

It could be argued that discourse, as it has become a dominant medium, the chosen medium of the transnational art world, has been subjected to the same skepticism leveled against more traditional mediums like painting in the '60s. There are of course different levels of discourse, different ways it functions: there's the ideal of critical, rational public debate as described by Jurgen Habermas; there's Michel Foucault's model of discourse as the enforcement of disciplinary regimes; and there's Pierre Bourdieu's idea of discourse, which is perhaps most permeated by class, social prestige and market forces. Discourse as criticism, as power, as value. If today discourse has become disenchanted, belief has drained away only from the first two of the three levels; what remains is discourse as the circulation and enactment of social status, prestige and symbolic capital. The waning importance of October and the new priorities established at Artforum indicate as much; if we no longer believe in discourse as criticism, we also can't afford to believe in its policing of disciplinary borders. In purely market terms, even discourse has proven not "expanded" or "horizontally spread" enough. Its requirement that members of the field stay abreast of terminologies and topics, that they read up and be in the know, has proven too exclusive. Today, what has replaced the gatekeeping of discourse is the all-pervasiveness of art stardom, the allover reach of celebrity. Art continues its expansion by embracing celebrity as the spectacle's lowest common denominator.²³

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Trying to stake a position within all this, some of today's most widely read critics--Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl, Christopher Knight, Raphael Rubinstein--often pass themselves off as the rightful heirs to Greenberg. "Value judgment" has replaced "beauty" as the new buzzphrase. In every article they feel obliged to remind us that they proudly belong to a besieged minority who still practice criticism the old-fashioned way: they don't fret over saying the right thing or adhering to academic canons of theory; they simply trust their experience. They don't try to "educate" their readers, to tell them what to think; rather, they dare to feel, they judge artworks. The distinction made here--between criticism as judgment and criticism as education--hews closely to the difference between modernism and postmodernism as characterized by advocates of the latter such as Krauss, who used precisely such terms in her introduction to Originality Of The Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Postmodernist criticism, she argued, is no longer a search for quality but an application of method. Others date the change to the early writings of Roland Barthes, who was said to solve the problem of how to give pop culture equal standing in the eyes of criticism by changing criticism's aim from the judgment of quality to the deciphering of ideology. Even before that, literary critics in the mold of Eliot and Leavis complained about people like Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke for devising critical systems that could dissect equally well a Joyce novel and a newspaper headline without saying anything about the relative "human" merits of the two.

Inside this long history is a story of criticism's professionalization and absorption into academia: the shared subtext to Frye's and Krauss's arguments is the securing for criticism of a more rigorous method and hence greater respect within the university. But the shift of focus from quality to ideology also marks a shift from modernism's basis in a certain historicist notion of the subject to postmodernism's basis in a certain structuralist notion of signification. For modernists, culture meant cultivation, the development of the faculties, passage from intuition to understanding, balance between feeling and thought. The threat to this developing body, whether the culture's or the individual's, was discontinuity, the splintering, stunting and decentering brought on by too much specialization and the collapse of any over-arching belief system. Hence all the early 20th-century handwringing over "the two cultures" or "the dissociation of sensibility." (Think of the line that starts "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," that no perspective is large enough to relate a poem by Eliot and a song by Eddie Guest). To snap sensibility back into alert unison, one exercised judgment. Postmodernists, who borrow from anthropology a view of culture as a structure of binary terms, see an exactly opposite threat: the worst that could happen is that culture becomes too unified, implacable, unassailable, that there exists no loose joints in the meaning system, no slippage between signifiers and ideological signifieds. To sow fissures in such a system, one exercises ideology critique. Disunity threatens modernism, whereas unity is the threat perceived by postmodernism.

Modernist art as defined by Greenbergian criticism was about an absolute value, the subjective feeing of quality, and the historical, dialectical nature of that quality's achievement. It was about pinpointing the enterprise of art in that notion of quality and pinpointing art's experience in the viewing subject (another of Greenberg's synonyms for at-onceness: "you feel pinpointed" by good art, he'd say). Discourse is different: its dominant model is textual not visual, it's about landscaping rather than pinpointing, about spreading and cross-referencing points in a grid of relevant terms, and those terms are more public (if specialized) than subjective. It's also not about decisive moments in a great drama of artistic achievement (Eliot's and Greenberg's "tradition") but rather about progress, disciplinary cogency and truth claims, about keeping abreast of the field. And finally the modernist dialectic was always based on sensibility, whereas discourse is seen as an application of technique, of critically rigorous methodologies, an analysis of signification. It's no coincidence that discourse becomes the dominant art medium once all artists start going to college to get MFAs in the '60s.

Saltz, Knight, Schjeldahl, Rubinstein, et al. insist proudly, as Greenberg did, that they haven't retreated into academia, that they still write for general interest magazines, and that their approach is "humanist," their point of departure always individual experience. Except they then happily sell out the whole modernist project: instead of struggling to keep united thought and feeling, intuition and understanding, as modernists attempted, they proudly abandon thinking, denounce any tie between what they feel and the larger world, and gleefully orphan their sensations within a hermetically sealed privacy, exactly the disaster modernist critics tried to forestall. In a show of camaraderie, Rubinstein recently quoted Knight's denunciation of the postmodern theorist-educator's "Puritan exhortations about the value of learning over sensuous experience and unruly imagination," which is itself a rephrasing of Peter Schjeldahl's cheer that beauty "suppresses intellect altogether, to the understandable horror of theorists and scholars."²⁴ What a shrill and catastrophic opposition.

If either model of criticism--modernist or postmodernist--exists at all for us today, it's as a shriveled up version of its former self. The postmodernist critic no longer sounds so triumphant when skeptically shifting focus away from the artwork to the contexts and contingencies that underlie and determine it--many are tenured art historians now, nested in the system, and continue to limit their attention to such long-canonized senior artists as Ryman or Richter, artists whose quality hasn't been in doubt for decades. And on the other hand we have the true judging critic who can feel but can't think, whose expertise has dwindled to a mute albeit heartfelt and supposedly authentic thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture. What's left is a postmodernist view of the system that isn't so much critical as conformist, and a modernist model of the self that's too incapacitated and dim-witted to act.

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Lane Relyea is an Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

FOOTNOTES (excerpted)
20. Krauss, "Pictorial Space," 68-69; "View of Modernism," 50.
21. Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1996), xiv; Laura Owens, "A Thousand Words: Laura Owens Talks About Her New Work," Artforum 37, no. 10 (Summer 1999): 131.
22. Foster, Return of the Real, xiv (see also Chapter 6). It should be said as well that art's appeal to academia came just as both were collapsing into the culture industry. According to Bruce Mau, one of today's top commercial designers, "the real product has become culture and intelligence." Quoted in Foster, Design and Crime, 23.
23. Hence Artforum's growing tendency to put headshots on its front covers. Since 1995, the magazine's choice for front-cover images has as often than not been of people's faces: whether it's Cindy Sherman in drag, or Paul McCarthy pulling his brains out during a performance, or a Ralph Billingham or Cragie Horsefield or Seydou Keita portrait, or the face of a Charles Ray mannequin, or (the crème de la crème) Rob Storr standing next to Chuck Close while the latter's humungous portrait of Kiki Smith gets installed for the artist's retrospective at MoMA, nearly half of the covers over the last half decade have been headshots of some type or another. Such a preference for front-cover faces is something Artforum shares with not art but fashion magazines.
24. Raphael Rubinstein, "A Quiet Crisis," Art in America 91, no. 3 (March 2003): 41; Peter Schjeldahl, "Beauty Contest," The New Yorker vol. 75, no. 32 (November 1, 1999), p. 108.