To the Editor:

James Gardner’s “Postmodernist Blues” [January] describes the current art scene with startling clarity and understanding. His observation that the general acceptance of postmodernism today is a miracle of marketing strikes me as right on the mark. It is particularly so in the field of architecture which, unlike many of the other arts, absolutely requires a patron before it can exist. That these patrons are often major organizations or institutions attests to the persuasiveness of those who are selling the idea. . . .

A few years hence, postmodernism may very well be relegated to the status of a dead letter. It may be to architecture what tail fins were to the automotive industry—an aberration that had to be experienced in all its triteness to clear the way for more mature creativity later on. . . .

William N. Bonham
Greenwich, Connecticut

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To the Editor:

James Gardner’s intelligent essay is more notable for the questions it raises than those it resolves. For example, he is prone to define modernism as artistic, and postmodernism as kitschy (or something very like it). Thus, when he mildly approves of anything postmodern, such as Philip Johnson’s AT&T building, it is because of its modernist residue. . . .

One can glean from Mr. Gardner’s use of pejorative terms such as “unlovely” and “cold” that aesthetic validity is partly established by discriminating between what is appealing and what is unappealing. Yet such a criterion is surely problematic. . . . A work like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” for example, is in the most obvious sense not just unappealing but repellent, yet it is a very great story. More to the point, it is precisely the burden of the populist case against architectural modernism (as reflected in, say, Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House) that its austerity and monotony make it “cold” and “unlovely.”

Mr. Gardner takes for granted that terms such as “moral seriousness,” “purity,” and “timelessness” separate the merely appealing . . . from the aesthetically valid, but all these terms are problematic. Since art is after all a historical enterprise, it seems peculiar to import the notion of timelessness into it, . . . and rather suggests a sort of Platonic transcendence. Equally odd is the use of the word “pure” in this context. Are we to understand that Bach and Beethoven adulterated the purity of their works by generous thematic borrowings from preexistent popular hymns? Is opera an impure, hybrid artistic form because it unites music and drama? Did the extensive collaboration of Picasso and Braque render their Cubist works impure? So hazy is Mr. Gardner’s use of the word that I can only think he means it, once more, to suggest spirituality. . . . Finally, it seems strange for Mr. Gardner to harp on the question of “moral seriousness” even after he (correctly) identifies “the built-in program of modernism . . . [as] the ever greater ascendancy of form over content.” The main point of modernism, let us recall, is that art should be taken seriously as an autonomous activity, requiring no extraneous justifications. . . . The overriding theme of what Mr. Gardner describes as the “complex of radical and bohemian attitudes” characteristic of modernism is that the artist is not an obedient member of society or the Church . . . but an independent craftsman . . . freed from subservience to earlier forms of patronage.

In short, what is peculiar about modernism is that, taken as a whole, it is not morally serious, but rather, by earlier standards, appallingly irresponsible. What it is serious about is art. I am inclined to agree with Mr. Gardner when he criticizes certain postmodernist tendencies as artistic travesties. . . . But to the extent that he seems to be criticizing postmodernism for failing to aspire to spiritual dignity, or not promulgating higher social values, I am afraid that he is cutting against the modernist grain as well. . . .

Only time will tell which of the so-called postmodernist artists achieved something durable, and which were overvalued due to temporary and local circumstances. But surely Mr. Gardner would agree to give due weight to his observation that “the [abstracting] momentum of modernism required it to go still further, but there was no place further to go.” In such a desperate circumstance, perhaps the retrenchment and eclecticism of postmodernism are necessary and healthy. In any case, they are certainly understandable, and should be viewed more charitably than Mr. Gardner has done.

Michael David Blume
Annapolis, Maryland

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James Gardner writes:

Though I agree with the thrust of William N. Bonham’s letter, I would remind him that when I spoke of a “miracle of marketing,” I was not referring to architects selling their clients on postmodernism, though that is miraculous, but rather to that largely suppositious dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism, which both sides of the debate seem to insist on with a suspicious vehemence.

With regard to Michael David Blume’s letter, I find it difficult to believe that he read my article with any degree of thoroughness. He has understood me far too quickly (by, perhaps, the second sentence). Instantaneously, indeed reflexively, he has associated me with a hard-line position from which I struggled for several thousand words to distinguish myself. When I offered definitions of modernism and postmodernism in the first few paragraphs, I did not suggest that I agreed with these definitions (from which I subsequently took pains to distance myself) but rather that these were the terms in which the principal combatants chose to define themselves. Never did I “harp on the question of ‘moral seriousness’” and not even in my sleep would I talk such rot about “timelessness” and “Platonic transcendence,” though I recognize that some earlier modernists did use such terms and many of their champions continue to do so today. As for the popular case against modernism, reflected by Tom Wolfe, which finds much modern architecture “cold” and “unlovely,” I get the impression from rereading my article that I largely supported that view. Mr. Blume appears to have misunderstood me almost deliberately when he chastises me for the use of the word “pure,” which, to the best of my recollection, I never used except in summarizing the position of many modernists.

All this talk about high seriousness has nothing to do with me, and I wonder through what kind of creative misreading Mr. Blume could ever have attributed it to me. All that concerns me is the distinction between artistic competence and artistic incompetence. All excellence is seriousness, but not all seriousness is excellence: most of it is mediocrity, and much of it is something worse. It is all a question of what is done well and what is done badly. Anyone who cannot see the qualitative distinction between Picasso and Schnabel, between Gauguin and Salle, between Raphael and Mariani, must be politely (or impolitely) left to his own devices.

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