Follow the oxygen
“It was 1874, it was a new republic, it was a new world. The artists who became the Impressionists took seriously what we now often fear: that when life changes outwardly, culture must change inwardly. In shocking ways, perhaps. At great cost, sometimes. But there is no way out of it. No art worth caring about that is not the image of society.”
Jason Farago wrote the above about the Impressionist Moment show at the National Gallery in the fall of 2024. I don’t feel like that last line goes far enough. Reflecting an image of society is, at best, journalism, at worst, propaganda. And there’s plenty of both around, calling itself art. But art worth caring about does both more and less than that.
On the ‘more’ side of things, art worth caring about doesn’t just reflect the image society has of itself. There’s a challenge, or a celebration, or something unsettled. The surprising idea in Impressionism was the assertion that the individual’s perception of the world took precedence over the world’s objective characteristics. This idea concerning the supremacy of the individual perspective not only succeeded in propagating, it has fully saturated our culture, leading to a brittle almost universal solipsism that is at the core of the current panoply of curated truth fiefdoms, self care markets, identity politics disputes, and authoritarian backlashes cropping up worldwide like global-warming-fueled severe weather events.
On the ‘less’ side of things, all an art object needs to do to end up ‘worth caring about’ is survive long enough. The Salon paintings in the Impressionist Moment show were created by the most celebrated artists of their generation. Outside of curators and art historians, nobody knows their names. But those paintings, because they survived, will be cared for as priceless objects as long as the possibility of doing so remains.