From The New Republic: Generations.

This catalogue of some of the most significant exhibitions by contemporary artists does not even begin to describe the season’s attractions. And yet a gallerygoer could feel something wanting–the thrilling power of artists to create force fields, to set off reverberations that stir passion, polemic, debate. I do not think the artists are to blame for this muddled state of affairs. The trouble begins with a widespread skepticism about the meaning or the value of art, a skepticism that can plague even those who want to feel otherwise. There seems little willingness to throw down the gauntlet, to go out on a limb, to argue ferociously because urgent and significant matters are at stake. This lack of excitement, I mean of the primary kind, has been variously described as postmodern, post-historical, or post-ideological, the idea being that we have gone beyond the old foolish strife, so that art can now simply be accepted as anything that anybody wants it to be.

But a theory of art that is grounded in the assumption that art can do without ardor is dangerous for art, and therefore for us. Art is by its very nature a form of emphasis and extremism. Artistic truth is an exaggeration, and a distortion of ordinary truth. This is something that Picasso teaches us, time and again. The artist takes experiences and apprehensions and enlarges them, extends them. Such an activity cannot be defined negatively, at least not for very long. No art worth considering can ever really be understood as post-this or post-that–as a rejection of classicism or of modernism or, for that matter, of Dadaism. Whatever its historical debts and struggles, art makes its claims in the present–as an argument for the value of immediate experience, and as a vindication of it.