ART « In Which Salvador Dali Experiences Something of a Beatdown »
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 10:53AM 
Dali
by HILTON KRAMER
Certain forms of art are less important for what they are than for what they signify. Though they traffic in aesthetic goods, the place they occupy in our culture has little to do with aesthetic illumination. To the language of art, they contribute nothing but a parody of established conventions. To the definition of feeling, which is the real glory of the artistic enterprise, they add only a corrupted simulacrum of familiar gestures.
Their sole function is to perform a visual charade in which the public — a public terrified at experiencing any emotion it has never experienced before — will recognize its own most cherished yearnings.
Art of this kind does not appeal to our curiosity but to our prejudices. Its mission is not to question or to complicate our emotions but to confirm them. And such art can only succeed in its meretricious task if it effectively disguises its rehearsal of the familiar in the kind of technical display which, for minds of a certain disposition, is always a satisfactory substitute for real vision.
Two artists in our time have brought this charade to a kind of bogus perfection — the American Andrew Wyeth and the Spaniard Salvador Dali. Both have been duly rewarded with a surpassing popularity and success.
One offers us an image of American life — pastoral, innocent and homespun — which bears about as much relation to reality as a Neiman-Marcus boutique bears to the life of the old frontier. The other offers us a fantasy of the psyche in which the real fissures of modern life are cosmetized in the very process of being evoked, and which thus exploits the anxieties of modernism while effectively subverting their critical and spiritual function. Together these two artists, with their respective daydreams of innocence and apocalypse, define — if indeed they do not exhaust — the artistic horizons of that vast, silent, uncritical majority which knows nothing about art but knows what it likes.
Of the two, Dali is unquestionably the more interesting and accomplished. He understands very well the modern appetite for violence and scandal, and has made a career of catering to this appetite, spicing each successive dish with sufficient outrage and surprise to keep the public a little baffled, a little angry, a little appalled, but always delighted, impressed, and — above all else — interested. He is a master showman who lavishes his real genius on the instruments of public relations. Only his talent goes into his art, which is less the focus of his deftly organized publicity campaigns than one of his means of achieving them.
For Dali, painting is always an applied art — an art applied to advancing his own personality.
His latest exhibition — now on view at M. Knoedler & Co. — is devoted to paintings and drawings from the years 1965-1970, and contains a larger selection of new work than Dali has shown in many years. There are twenty-two items, several of them vast "machines" of the type that so delighted the knuckle-headed spectators in the official salons of the last century and that, to judge by the size and spirit of the crowds pouring into Knoedler's every day, have lost none of their power to impress a public content to live without intelligence or taste.
The famous technique has lost none of its luster. Only the power to shock has, perhaps, grown a little dimmer with the passage of time, but this is less a fault of Dali's than a reflection of the degree to which modern culture has now immunized itself against aesthetic shocks of any sort.
Nowadays the real shocks come from life rather than art, and Dali — even Dali, who has made such a specialty of shocking the public — is as helpless as anyone else in the face of this development. The time is past when his fantasies could disturb us. Now it is only his taste that disturbs, and even this is less a disturbance than a mild discomfort. For the first time, one almost feels a little sorry for Dali — all that effort invested in such a petty provocation.
As painting, of course, it is complete rubbish. The ostentatious display of "old master" ambition has degenerated into the purest kitsch. The puerile fantasy, with its aggressive self-importance and operatic rhetoric, is no longer even amusing. The feeble attempt at satire ends only in satirizing the satirist's own quite silly machinations. Everything about this work reminds us that we are dealing with a "case," a social phenomenon, an episode in the history of taste and reputations rather than an example of genuine artistic accomplishment.
"The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses," George Orwell once wrote, "are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism." Orwell defined Dali's sensibility as fundamentally that of an Edwardian illustrator. "Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones, and other paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany, and Where the Rainbow Ends." The paraphernalia has changed since Orwell wrote his essay a quarter of a century ago, but everything in the current exhibition confirms this critical judgment.
As for the celebrated "aberrations" that were once so shocking, Orwell remarked: "Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace." Dali's desperation in this respect is now greater than ever, for the distance separating his facile, self-willed eccentricities and the commonplaces of our culture has been drastically reduced. The blatant "camp" that dominates the taste of his latest work is now the property of every two-bit filmmaker and commercial artist on the current scene.
None of this will dim Dali's popularity with the vast public that adores him — the public that still swoons over both his antics and his success — for Dali performs an essential service for this public. He provides a vision of the apocalypse that is at once exquisite and harmless — the apocalypse turned into a parfumerie. In performing that service, Dali brings the retrograde character of his art into perfect alignment with his decadent social ideology.
March 22, 1970
You can find more Hilton Kramer in his book The Age of the Avant-Garde, which you can purchase here.
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Reader Comments (4)
what a ridiculous assessment of what you clearly don't anything over a coffee table understanding of. though, i'm sure anyone who doesn't actually know the subject will think you an expert for slamming him. Do you really feel sorry for him? how so? because he puts it out there and you just critique? really? pathetic.
horrible critique of Dali. how could you attempt to turn a master's art into something unoriginal? i really hope you aren't an art history major.
Well you're quite the expert assessor, aren't you Mr. Kramer? I suppose that's why the world is going to forever remember the works of Hilton Kramer, while forgetting the works of Salvador Dali or Andrew Wyeth. As we all know, the critics are always recalled fondly in the hearts and minds of admirers as time goes by, while the masters and authors who created the engaging works of art which the critics feel free to dismiss are quickly forgotten. Yes, we thank you Mr. Kramer.
Oh, by the way Mr. Kramer... which museums might I find your work on display again?
OK Mr. Kramer; your 15 minutes are up. You're free to go. NEXT!