Letters to the Editor: Karen Bass’ scholarship problem looks bad. Don’t ignore it.
Posted: March 4, 2013
You have to admire Karen Bass’ ambition in trying to persuade readers (as well as an editor, a publisher and a reviewer) to rethink their understanding of modern American popular culture. Her essay, “The Modernist American Artist as a Victim of the Modernist American Art Industry,” appeared in Harper’s magazine in 2012. That same year, the same magazine published “A Theory of the Modernist American Painter,” by David Bordwell and Elizabeth Cline. In an open letter to editors, you argue that Bass is the real victim of a “march toward deconstruction, a movement that has rendered the notion of the artist as a serious artist as a joke and, worst of all, as a fool, unable to comprehend his own art.” Indeed, you suggest the notion that visual art and music are different can only mean the artist is a “victim of its own success.” But you conclude that Bass is actually the victim of an “academic tradition of seeing art as a social, political and emotional force” that has caused “art’s own critical collapse.” Your analysis of Bass’ essay is not entirely convincing, but it could make a good case for a broader understanding of what you consider a failed social theory.
The problem with Bass’s notion of the artist as a victim is that her theory cannot even stand on its own without collapsing into her other theory—that the artist is a victim of his or her own success. The reason is that to be a victim of your success is the very definition of success. When you can define your success as the success of others, you can define yourself as a victim of your success.
To be a victim of success is to define one’s success as the success of others. If you say your success is the success of others, then you define yourself as successful. To be a victim of your success is to define yourself as a victim of other people’s success. In fact, it is the very definition of success.
Now let’s say