II. A Crisis of Meaning
II. A Crisis of Meaning
The subjugation of art—and of cultural life generally—to political ends has been one of the great spiritual tragedies of our age. Among much else, it has made it increasingly difficult to appreciate art on its own terms, as affording its own kinds of insights and satisfactions. — Roger Kimball
Today’s leading art institutions are locked in a profound crisis of meaning that stems from a misunderstanding of art’s fundamental nature.
The contemporary establishment—primarily our universities and major museums—presses art into the service of ideology by defining it as an intellectual and political exercise. This view demands that art can only be experienced when mediated through the lens of ideas.
This stands in stark contrast to the central principle that guided art and art history for generations: art is, at its very core, a sensual experience. This view asserts that everything compelling and profoundly meaningful about art is concentrated in the physical composition of the object, and its capacity to evoke in the viewer an experience that is both transformative and transcendent. When the viewer confronts directly a work of art of extraordinary quality, the mind is, within a fraction of a second, overwhelmed with what the art historian Lorenz Eitner described as “a turbulent confluence of sense impressions and involuntary associations.” Once engaged in this experience, the formal composition of an object exerts its power to, in Eitner’s words, “rouse our senses to a state of responsive happiness which communicates itself to our whole being.” This is why works that possess a virtuosic organization of formal elements are recognized as having quality, and why only a fraction of these are of such an extraordinary expressive character that they are judged to be “masterpieces.”
Masterpieces once formed the core of the art-historical canon. A number of them have, for centuries or even millennia, resisted the oblivion to which almost everything made by human hands is eventually consigned. The process that sustains them is not faultless, but it has proven remarkably resilient. Judgment of this kind is not primarily deliberative, nor is it directed by committee. In the context of art, its trust rests in what Eitner calls the “fundamental permanence of the human sensory constitution.” The canon of art history is a living inheritance, which is composed of outstanding works that past generations judged to be of transcendent beauty and felt compelled to pass on to future generations. Almost without exception, their value has proven to be remarkably lasting, and their appeal has remained vital to connoisseurs, instructive and worthy of emulation to artists, and deeply resonant for those who encounter them directly.
According to this traditional view, ideas are of secondary importance in art. Ideas are conceptual and depend entirely on form for their transformation into perceptual reality. Because of this dependence, the force of an idea is proportional to the expressive power of the formal composition that carries it. Beautiful form intensifies an idea; weak form renders even the most earnest idea inconsequential. Of major significance is that form itself carries meaning and can exist without a compelling concept. This accounts for the lasting appeal of Van Gogh’s Chair, Cezanne’s Apples, or a still-life by Chardin. Art is a sensuous medium, and an expert and sensual handling of an object is the fundamental force that drives the viewer’s experience, which is emotional, deeply satisfying, and transcendent.
The postmodern turn that began dominating academia in the late 1960s found this older view deeply problematic. Grounded in grievance, the new scholarship pronounced that true meaning in art could be uncovered only by treating the physical composition of a work with skepticism—or, in more militant accounts, with outright rejection. The formal structure of a work was no longer trusted as the primary site of meaning.
The new framework denies that formal quality can be shared: the formalist view of “excellence” is a value judgement, verified only by the eye. Any judgement that one work is better than another is imposing a hierarchy of taste that is shaped by the oppressive forces of race, gender, class, and power. Formal mastery and the transcendental character of aesthetic experience are illusory—Romantic myths, better suited to the nineteenth century than the realities of the twenty-first. The transcendent joy of aesthetic experience is not denied; it is discredited as something made intelligible by “bourgeois” conditioning. It is unreliable to make judgements, and something to be set aside as a quaint reminder of an age long gone. Meaning can only be sought in the intellectually higher regions of ideas and ideology.
The “New Art History”
When the “New Art History” was first named in the early 1980s and rapidly became the mainstream consensus, it insisted that art must be interpreted through broader social, political, and cultural contexts. Its aim was to expose the inequities of the Western tradition by focusing on identity, class, and systemic oppression. Within a decade, the academic perception of art was transformed from an experience of a sensuous object into a vehicle for ideology, something to be “decoded” according to social and political structures—little more than an illustration of an idea.
Once inquiry moved away from the perceptual experience of the object, the direct confrontation with the physical work became almost unnecessary. The analysis of the formal nuance of an object was dismissed as subjective and class-bound—the unstable province of connoisseurs preoccupied with formal subtlety and refinement. Formalism’s grounding in material, visible form was relentlessly assaulted by critics as existing in a self-contained “optical” bubble, enamored with “pretty surfaces.” Even worse, because formalism was so engaged with “how things look,” it ignored the work of exposing oppressive power structures of gender, class and institutional injustices.
But formalist orthodoxy continued to have one staunch defender during the 1960s and 70s. Clement Greenberg was a powerful voice, having published art criticism regularly since the 1940s in the Partisan Review and The Nation. He often advocated for Abstract Expressionism, singling out Jackson Pollock for greatness. As formalism came under assault beginning in the 60s, Greenberg’s criticism continued to have a wide and popular audience, and he took a clear and unambiguous stand: “Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles, and what counts first and last is quality; all other things are secondary.”
Not surprisingly, Greenberg suffered an onslaught of criticism from nearly all the leading theorists of the time: from T.J. Clark and Rosalind Krauss to Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh. Feminist and Marxist critics especially asserted that formalism was “naive,” “superficial,” and “a dead end for critical thought.” These critics argued that by ignoring social concerns and asserting the validity of tradition in its critique of art, formalism upheld the conservative agenda and sustained art’s role in the capitalist market and existing social order. Formalism’s insistence on the primacy of the canon and the existence of “masterpieces” promoted patriarchal and elitist social structures that critics were fighting to dismantle.
Clearly, the ostensible neutrality of formalism wasn’t neutral at all. Critics claimed that the silence of formalists toward theory and ideology was an act of complicity in maintaining all of the corrupt social systems that oppressed the weak and disenfranchised. By the year 2000, critical theory had ascended to the moral high ground, and the targeting of formalism for obliteration on university campuses became the just thing to do. The majority of faculty at the most prestigious art history departments in America were now in some manner teaching and publishing critical theory. The days of formalism having any presence in higher education and in major museums were numbered.
This was a seismic shift in the study of art history that, not coincidentally, greatly facilitated academic research. Inquiry into art could now be conducted—often entirely—through photographic reproductions consulted within university and museum offices. For many American art historians especially, this was a boon to research: it eliminated the need for expensive, time-consuming, and laborious travel to experience an object first-hand. Such travel, once deemed invaluable for bringing authenticity to research, now served only to slow the output of publications, the primary engine of academic advancement.
By the 1980s, the theory boom and the concurrent growth of the professorate caused an unprecedented expansion of published research in art history. Art history monographs published by a university press doubled during the ten years after the late 1980s. Journals seized the moment and began to specialize in incorporating theory with disciplines like art history. As a consequence, the number of journals that could publish art historical articles skyrocketed. There were only a handful of flagship art history journals in 1970; but by 2010 that number had grown by literally hundreds, all publishing articles that could incorporate art history. It wasn’t long before the pressure to publish for tenure and promotion increased at university and college departments around the country. The publication of a monograph, once considered the crowning achievement of an entire career’s devotion to a subject, suddenly became a requirement for tenure at a growing number of universities. This meant that a commitment to ideology became almost a professional necessity.
Art’s new role of merely illustrating ideas increased its value tenfold to the ranks of faculty that were growing exponentially as university enrollments hit historic highs from the mid-1960s onward. As the professorate grew in size, the critique of art was slowly relinquished to younger generations that had been fully indoctrinated in making art history serve political ends for the so-called “collective good.” As the formalist perspective was being squeezed slowly out of universities, academia was losing far more than a force for beauty and formal excellence. Formalism—like the broader Western tradition from which it sprang—was a true voice for artistic freedom, liberated from the inhibiting constraints of ideology. In fact, it made no ideological demands on art whatsoever. Formalism was remarkably inclusive of ideas But It was directed by a central principle: for a work of art to be included in serious intellectual discussion, it had to attain a high degree of formal excellence—a judgment grounded in the work’s perceptible structure rather than in its abstract political utility.
For those of us in graduate school in the 1980s, it was already clear that the New Art History had no place for formalism or excellence. Although more militant faculty publicly despised censorship and oppression, they spearheaded the movement to rid the academic environment of dissenting opinion, especially one as potent as formalism. They had attained political power across America’s broad landscape of oollege campuses, and they intended to use it. They removed formalism from not only the curriculum but from consideration for future faculty appointments. Dave Hickey was perhaps the most perceptive of academia’s critics, and wrote:
The language of visual affect, of beauty and desire, has been systematically banished from the discourse, replaced by a vocabulary of blunt instrumentality: social critique, historical contextualization, and therapeutic intervention. These are properties that can be administered, taught, and evaluated by committees.
The Complexity of Formalism
One of the significant factors that initiated the move away from formalism was the notorious difficulty associated with mastering the approach. Formalism is grounded in description, and it requires precise, accurate analysis of at least three things: a work’s formal properties; how those properties interact to produce expression; and the emotional response that this expression elicits from the viewer. The approach is, therefore, highly accountable to the physical object: if the description does not correspond to what is actually visible and verifiable, the argument fails.
For critical theorists this kind of grounding in perceptible reality was a serious liability. Approaches grounded in social, political, or ideological frameworks could be elaborated and defended with far less risk of direct visual contradiction. That difference in vulnerability helps explain why many found the newer methods more tractable and professionally advantageous.
Formalism also presented the real challenge of translating what the eye perceives into linear prose—a monumental literary challenge. Any attempt to translate into language the lived moment between beholder and object inevitably flattens and distorts it. The philosopher and critic George Steiner wrote in his 1989 book Real Presences that genuine aesthetic experience is "un-sayable" and pushes us past the border of language into silence. Gerhard Richter gave a painter’s view of the problem when he stated: "You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing—what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that." The philosopher Susanne Langer perhaps put it best when she wrote that there are aspects of experience that are “presentational” rather than “discursive”—they can be shown, but never fully stated.
Nearly everything about the viewer’s encounter with the art object is uncertain, and at its very heart is an experience that stubbornly resists conceptualization—”responsive happiness.” This powerfully aesthetic experience—that “communicates itself to our whole being”—feels ineffable: a sudden sense of emotional resonance and harmony that defies neat summary. You can only vaguely describe it with metaphors and descriptions, but you can never completely capture or reproduce the experience itself. The living encounter remains stubbornly personal and ephemeral.
For modern academics, a methodology that requires a close and accurate observation of the object, a discursive analysis, and is centered on a sensual experience that resists full description made the approach unfathomable for research. Ideological criticism offers a far more productive path. The skeletal structure of any ideology is like a roadmap that is easy to follow; it’s predictable and quite reliable for generating publications. Even better, with every book or article published, the author signals their own intellectual sophistication and ethical commitment. By the 1980s, an arsenal of methodologies drawn from disciplines across the university campus was deployed in art departments: Post-Colonial Theory, Queer Theory, Radical Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Identity Politics, Marxism, and many more.
The Threat of Beauty
For half a century, critical theory has systematically undermined the foundational values of the Western tradition, portraying its history, institutions, and achievements as instruments of subjugation. Beauty, quite literally, became dangerous—a weapon wielded by the oppressor. Roger Scruton observed the cultural consequence:
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert or transgress moral certainties and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes.
Time and again, critical theorists identified the union of art and beauty as an obstacle to their pursuit of political power. They warned that the belief in the ability of beauty to elicit a transcendental experience would prove fatal to their cause. Theodor Adorno, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, held one of the more militant views of art. His statement that “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," became a reliable campus mantra. He declared: “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
Despite Adorno’s objection, there is indeed much about aesthetic beauty that is magical: it elicits an immediate, direct, profoundly personal response that is entirely involuntary. It bypasses any mediating influence like ideology, and for critical theorists this represented the very heart of the problem. The profound experience that occurs between object and viewer is an assertion of the viewer’s independence. It occurs outside the “ideological framework” that theory superimposes on the art experience, and allows the individual viewer to govern art’s interpretation. To control the individual, art had to be mediated by ideology.
Theorists wasted no time in condemning not only the practitioners of formalism but any viewer who found satisfaction in beauty—this was denigrated as “bourgeois self-indulgence.” As far back as the mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin attacked those who shirked their ostensible political duties and found in art an “object of comfortable contemplation.” He asserted that this turned art into something attractive and therefore an “article of consumption.” Adorno took this a step further and wrote:
Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by expressions like ‘a feast for the ears.’
But the allure of art lies precisely in the emotional satisfaction it can produce—what Eitner called “a state of responsive happiness.” This transcendental power of art—the sense of completion and universal connection it brings—resides at the opposite end of the spectrum from the discontent and resentment that animate much of critical theory.
Vladimir Lenin, after listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata, captured perfectly the tension:
I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head…they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm—what a devillishly difficult job.
Revolutions are not fueled by kindness or sympathy or saying “sweet, silly things;" they are fueled by grievance, discord, and, when necessary, unbridled forms of violence—”you have to beat people’s little heads...” Where the natural human impulse seeks beauty, harmony, connection, and peace—critical theory demands disruption. Herbert Marcuse, a near iconic presence of the Frankfurt School, insisted that genuine liberation requires the subversion of established culture because the pleasure it brings is a substitute for real liberation. It leads to a “one-dimensional man” with a “happy consciousness”: an internalized satisfaction that makes resistance to an “unfree society” seem less urgent and even unnecessary. Contentment leads to passivity toward injustice. Art must be forced into permanent friction with the established political order. Adorno described it clearly as the “task of art today is to bring chaos into order.” Marcuse identified art’s fatal weakness when he stated:
By virtue of its form, [art] pacifies the horror, the ugliness, the cruelty of reality, even where it presents and indicts these features. In this sense, all art is essentially a happy end.
The Aftermath
The damage from the near abandonment of formalism is unmistakable. The pessimism of critical theory, its flagrant desire to disrupt stable society, to denigrate contentment as bourgeois, and to sew the seeds of discord to facilitate revolution is anything but inspirational.
Younger audiences—the future lifeblood of any institution—show the clearest signs of disengagement. Young collectors are reportedly 30 percent less likely than people over 45 to hold an active museum membership. Only about 16 percent currently belong to a museum. Half of those who did belong cancelled in the last three years.
Museums for the first time are talking about the problem out loud. In the 2024 New York Times article “Where Are Young Art Collectors and Museum Donors?,” MoMA’s Glenn Lowry calls engaging the next generation “hard work,” and MoMA staff members fear that this generation of young collectors may keep their collections private rather than donate them to a public museum.
The number of art history degrees awarded between the 2010s and 2020s fell by roughly one-third. At the University of Colorado, Boulder students majoring in art history have declined over the last 15 years by a jaw-dropping 78%.
Even more foreboding is the lack of interest in art history by the massive group of students that major in areas requiring “culture literacy” credits—areas like computer science, business and engineering. Enrollment from this area has traditionally been high in art history, but even at prestigious liberal arts institutions like Williams College the decline of interest in art history has been alarming. In 2001, 65% of the college’s student body had taken an art history course by graduation. That number has dropped to 40%.
Connoisseurship—the rigorous analysis of an artwork’s formal qualities for purposes of authentication, attribution, and quality assessment—is now taught at a degree-granting level at only a handful of institutions worldwide. In the United States, with over 368 art history departments, traditional object-based training is nearly gone.
Attendance at art museums has stagnated or declined, with more than half of all museums reporting that 2026 attendance remained well below 2019 pre-covid levels.
As Roger Kimball commented in 2007:
…the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.
“Crisis” and “collapse” are words often used to describe the decline of interest in the other disciplines of the humanities, where critical theory dominates. Between 2012 and 2024, total humanities degree completions plummeted by more than one-third, even as university enrollments across all fields grew.
Tenure-track faculty hiring in humanities departments has dropped to historically low levels, forcing universities to either close humanities programs entirely or rely heavily on low-paid adjunct instructors. Forty percent of humanities degree holders say they would not choose the same major if given the chance.
The drop in humanities majors over the last twenty years—in English, art history, the classics, and philosophy—has been steep, and it cannot be explained by economics and careerism alone. Universities prefer these explanations—and both pressures are real—but they have been with us for decades. And, yet, a liberal-arts education remained a popular and respected path throughout the 1960s.
Something in the classroom changed.
In art history the force behind the decline is not difficult to track. When critical theory displaced formalism, the natural delight a human being takes in transcendent form was crowded out by a politics that treated discontent as the subject of serious study. To exalt in the classroom that the formal composition of a work is powerfully alive and emotionally moving invites being called naïve, bourgeois and even dangerously oppressive. Cynicism has become the mark of sophistication. This may not be the only reason students left the humanities in general, but it is the reason for the exodus from the discipline of art history.
To restore art and art history to their rightful place on the university campus, we must restore the primary role of form in our daily life. In the next chapter, The Biology of Form, we demonstrate how art was part of our prehistoric ancestors’ deepest nature, and how our own sense of beauty, our own desire to create lasting artistic statements are inherited from them. This reflects the innate power of form, and this power operates without abstract ideas, social constructs or political agendas. As Sir Herbert Read wrote nearly a century ago: “The sense of form is not an acquired habit, but an inherent biological property of the human organism.”
At some point, the educational establishment must admit that art has far more in common with human biology than any ideology. Art represents a critical component of being human and is part of our very origins. Art, with a poignancy that is almost unequaled, directs us toward discovering who and what we are. Teach art history in this way, and its message is not only universal but resonates with truth, meaning, and beauty.
