Avant-gardism may dominate the world of fine art, but the truly creative work nowadays can be found in popular and commercial genres.
As manifestations of avant-garde art, Frederick Turner cites "atonality in music, abstraction in painting and sculpture, the plotless novel, the meterless and unrhymed poem, the theater of cruelty, and Bauhaus architecture." Writing in a recent issue of the American Arts Quarterly, Turner, professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas, Dallas, describes avant-gardism as "in some ways an inhuman art, matching the inhumanity of the age of statism, totalitarianism, political ideology, and total war, and the events it produced -- the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields."
Turner points out, however, that "new artforms have emerged from the popular creative imagination during these times, beneath the radar of the official avant-garde, that have been richly human. . . . Jazz, for instance, through much of its history was part of a living fabric of dance, song, stage performance, religious ritual, musical theater, and movies. It began to wither," he laments, "when it was taken up by the fashionable avant-garde. . . . Moviemaking itself has provided a vital medium for a commercial and human art of quality and even greatness. Opera was taken over and 'purified' by 'serious' music," Turner recalls, "but resurrected itself in the popular forms of Broadway and the great film musicals. Commercial art flourished . . . rising to powerful expressiveness in the graphics of Marvel Comics, in magazine advertising, in Disney cartoon cels, and in the work of such illustrators as Norman Rockwell."
Insisting that "even TV has contributed to the real art of our time," Turner argues that the best programs "show an intelligence, originality, charm, and craftsmanship quite comparable with the general run of Restoration drama [and] the nineteenth-century popular novel. . . . Popular music has thrown up large talents," he continues. "Cuisine has blossomed, nourished by an increasingly sophisticated public palate. New artforms such as HTML web-page design . . . have absorbed the modernist and postmodernist experiments without being corrupted by them. . . ."
Turner acknowledges the "difference between the higher and the lower grades of art. Mass appeal and novelty cannot substitute for quality and enduring relevance," he affirms. And yet, there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. "Low art feeds off the more enduring and complex achievements of high art and intellectual achievement," Turner explains; "and high art returns the favor by taking folk or popular art motifs and forms, and raising them to a pitch of excellence that ensures their passage across cultural boundaries and into the future."
Turner emphasizes that "high and low art, the refined and the popularly accessible, are essential to each other. Low art gets complexity and intellectual depth from high art; high art gets vitality and a line into the unconscious wisdom of the species from low art. The greatest artists," he concludes, "are those who, like Shakespeare and Bach, combine both." You're apt, nowadays, to encounter the work of great artists in every conceivable medium and venue -- just not among the avant-garde.
