![]() In the 19th century, it was called “art for art’s sake,” and it involved not only a commitment to art as such rather than the various instrumental purposes to which it is normally put, but also a recognition that what counts is the artist’s conception of a work, which generates criteria that are incommensurable with putatively objective standards. The evident congruence across the centuries between Pliny and Baudelaire suggests that, at least in its origins, modernism was the outbreak of a sensibility that had already flourished in various times and places. (The exhibition, with which the museum has inaugurated its tenancy of the former Whitney Museum of American Art-henceforth to be known as the Met Breuer after its architect, Marcel Breuer-is on view through September 4.) They cite the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, who observed in the first century “that the last works of artists and their unfinished pictures…are more admired than those which they finished, because in them are seen the preliminary drawings left visible and the artists’ actual thoughts.” Consider the difference, for example, between the omniscient narrator of the high Victorian novel and Flaubert’s style indirect libre, which depends on the reader making implicit connections and intuiting unmarked shifts in viewpoint or, in the 20th century, the rejection by modernist architects of ornament-which had long been considered indispensable to a building’s finish-as something that, as August Perret remarked, “generally conceals a defect in construction.”įor all that, the force of the unfinished was far from a discovery of the 19th century, as Kelly Baum and Andrea Bayer point out in the catalog for “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,” the exhibition they’ve curated with Sheena Wagstaff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And this change in painting and sculpture occurred in tandem with similar developments in the other arts. ![]() Similarly, a few years later, Whistler was accused by the Victorian sage himself, John Ruskin, of doing nothing more than “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” But Baudelaire had already anticipated the howls of Manet’s and Whistler’s denigrators when he observed, in 1845, “that in general what is ‘completed’ is not ‘finished’ and that a thing ‘finished’ in detail may well lack the unity of the ‘completed’ thing.” From Manet and Whistler (or, indeed, from their predecessor Corot, who was the object of Baudelaire’s defense) until today, artistic modernism has been inseparable from the critique of finish. The gauntlet was first thrown down by Manet, whose works in the 1860s were declared by critics to be unfinished-in fact, not even paintings but mere sketches. ![]() The question of finish was crucial to the emergence of modernism. ![]() They evoke what might be called a kind of mathematical sublime, to borrow Kant’s phrase. Such works may not be literally infinite in scope, but no one reader could ever experience all their various instantiations. Other art forms have their own variants, such as Nanni Balestrini’s novel Tristano, in which the order of the text varies in every printed copy-its publishers claim there are 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations-or Stan Douglas’s video Journey Into Fear (2001), in which a 15-minute film loop is synched to bits of dialogue that are scrambled and recombined by a computer in combinations that play out for more than six consecutive days. ![]()
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