ROGER KIMBALL: We Can’t Have Nice Things.

The road to our current impasse began with the “anti-art” movement of Dadaism. For with Dada, the brash energy of the avant-garde was short-circuited, flipped on its head. Dada did not seek to provide yet another fresh answer to the question, “What’s new?” On the contrary, Dada sought to subvert the entire context in which the question gained urgency. That the extreme strategies of Dada, too, were quickly incorporated as part of the metabolism of art.

From this perspective, Dada, and every subsequent innovation, by definition, appears as a variation on an already defined theme: an anti-theme, really, whose very negativity provides a foil for the ceaseless play of novelty. But in fact, the incorporation of Dada into the fabric of the avant-garde did have consequences. For one thing, Dada altered the tenor of the avant-garde. Dada might seek to occupy extreme points, but it did so out of a systematic contrariness: it had no ambition “to attain for an hour that crest of the wave in a tossing sea,” as the French critic Albert Thibaudet put it, because it had given up on the whole idea of art as a spiritual quest. Indeed, Dada was an art form that had given up on art.

Consider: in 1914, Marcel Duchamp dusted off a commercial bottle rack and offered it, tongue firmly in cheek, to the public as art. The public (at least the taste-making part of it) swooned with delighted outrage. In 1917, Duchamp upped the ante. He scrawled the name “R. Mutt” on a urinal, baptized it “Fountain,” and said (in effect) “How about it?” What a delicious scandal ensued. How original! How innovative! But also how destructive of the essential protocols and metabolism of art.

But not, it soon became clear, as destructive as Duchamp had wished. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously some years later, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” Oh, dear.

Duchamp had wished not to extend but to subvert, to destroy, the whole category of art and aesthetic delectation. Instead, his antics polluted and trivialized it. How much of contemporary art is essentially tired repetition of gestures inaugurated by Duchamp and his immediate successors? Damien Hirst? Been there. Tracy Emin? Ditto. Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger? Ditto, ditto. As the sage of Ecclesiastes put it, there is nothing new under the sun.

Duchamp made it as far as Afghanistan though, where we tried to convince the locals of why they should buy in to the superiority of an enlightened modern Western culture that even our elites don’t take very seriously: