The Academy now embraces strange, postmodern works. Today, the “show of rejects” is also a symbol: it represents the fallibility of conservative art institutions.
That outdoor show proved extremely popular, featuring artistic greats like the painters Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne, and paved the way for avant-garde movements like impressionism. In 1863, this institution rejected so many artists from showing at an exhibit in the Louvre that another display, the Salon des Refuses, was held outside the museum. At one point, the Academy had a hierarchy of painting styles, prioritizing realistic works above all else. The French Academy of Fine Arts, for example, is the most prestigious artistic institution in the nation. They attempt to evaluate the quality of a given work based on allegedly objective measures and put aside personal feelings. But the experts also know the experts can be wrong sometimes. Those who try to justify their classifications of “art” and “not-art”-people like Watts, or art professors, for example-draw on history and authority, looking to the artists and movements from the past, along with famous critics, for guidance. This is essentially the approach the US Supreme Court took in defining pornography in the 1967 case, Jacobellis v. Some assess art based on their instincts, simply saying that they know it when they see it. Watts’ essay is part of an age-old debate about what qualifies as “good” art, and the role that popularity ought to play in making that judgment. This question is ultimately unanswerable, but people love to debate it. And Watts, who is all about tradition based on her essay, should know that history isn’t on the side of old-timers. But this is one of the oldest stories in the art history book. Watts wants to stop the populist tide before it starts when it comes to her chosen art, poetry.
Lovecraft and hard-boiled detective master Dashiell Hammett, are now seen as literary greats, in retrospect, decades after they emerged in lowbrow publications.
Similarly, one-time pulp writers, like horror’s H.P. Both artists were eventually elevated from the realm of the new, crude, and laughable to the artistic canon, with their works sold in galleries and hung in museums. The problem with her position, however, is that from a historical perspective, much of the work that we consider worthwhile now was once seen as decidedly lowbrow. Consider Andy Warhol’s prints of Campbell’s soup cans, inspired by ads, or Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti, which was once seen as vandalism.