The difference between then and now is that the pattern of world cultural activity has made the very idea of the single, imperial center obsolete. New York, in other words, remains a center, but not, as its art world used to imagine, the center. Its centrality is based mainly on the market, and the market has nothing to do with cultural vitality.

A few years ago a popular neo-Marxist argument held that finesse of taste and connoisseurship were only masks for market activity, genteel ways in which a ravenous commercialism could spin euphemisms about itself. Anyone who believed that should look at the art market today. It is now run almost entirely by finance manipulators, fashion victims, and rich ignoramuses. The collector as connoisseur has been squeezed out of it. Connoisseurship is an impediment to its progress—mere dust on the road down which the inflationary march proceeds. Under the market’s malignant sway, genuine expertise will soon be entirely redundant: the market’s object is to erase all values that might impede anything at all from becoming a “masterpiece.” In this situation, whose epicenter is New York, the role of the museum, like that of the critic, is attenuated. And because it has never paid more than lip service to the idea of state patronage of the arts, the United States has no dominant cultural institutions that are not tied into the market.

IV.

IN THE 1980s more paper wealth was generated in New York than in any other city at any other time in human history. Greenmail, junk bonds, leverage, and the precarious liquidity of an overgeared credit economy transformed the art world into the Art Industry, turnover immense, regulations none. What was a picture worth? One bid below what someone would pay for it. And what would that person pay for it? Basically what he or she could borrow. And how much art could dance for how long on that particular pinhead? Nobody had the slightest idea. What is certain is that nobody foresaw the hyperinflation of the market; and that when the bubble bursts, or softly deflates, as bubbles do, nobody will have foreseen that either.

Twenty years ago the idea that any work of art made in the past century would sell for a million dollars seemed like science fiction to most people. In 1972, when the National Gallery of Canberra paid about $2 million for Pollock’s Blue Poles, the price made headlines and contributed marginally to the Australian public’s acceptance of the fall of the Whitlam government soon afterward. Today, when someone pays 5 or 10 million for a modern painting, the event rates no more than a sentence or two in the auction reports of The New York Times. We have come to take it for granted that art should be alienatingly expensive: it seems normal that its price should violate our sense of decency.

ALTHOUGH ART has always been a commodity, it loses its intrinsic value and its social use when it is treated only as a commodity. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of the contemplation of it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning, and visual experience generally, under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then hidden in storage, what would happen to one’s sense of literature—the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse? “Where works of art are rare,” young Goethe wrote on first visiting Naples, “rarity itself is a value; it is only when they are common … that one can learn their intrinsic worth.” The truth of these words is nearly lost to us, in a culture wrecked by its own commercialization. What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.

At the end of the 1980s there may have been 500 people in the world who could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents. Never before have the impulses of art appreciation and collecting been so nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display as in the late 1980s, and nowhere more so than in the United States, especially when the Japanese are buying. The new relations between “price” and “value” were epitomized at Sotheby’s New York auction of Andy Warhol’s collection in 1988, when necrophiles and relic hunters competed to pay $20,000 a piece for the dead artist’s cookie jars.

Yet the game had losers as well as winners, and by the late 1980s the losers, interestingly enough, were American. They were chiefly the American museums, and through the museums the American public. The art market boom has been an unmitigated disaster for the public life of art. It has distorted the ground of people’s reaction to painting and sculpture. Thirty (even twenty) years ago anyone, amateur or expert, could spend an hour or two in a museum without wondering what this Tiepolo, this Rembrandt, this de Kooning might cost at auction. Thanks to the unrelenting propaganda of the art market, this is no longer quite the case; and the imagery of money has been so crudely riveted onto the face of museum-quality art by events outside the museum that its unhappy confusion between price and value may never be resolved. It is like the bind in the fairy tale: at the bottom of the meadow a treasure lies buried, and it can be dug up under one condition, that while digging, you do not think of a white horse.

There are many areas, moreover, in which American museums can no longer buy. (British museums are worse off: as a result of the malignant policies of Margaret Thatcher, they cannot repair their own roofs.) They voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. The symbol of the plight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an annual booklet that used to be titled Notable Acquisitions. In 1986 it was renamed Recent Acquisitions. As the museum’s director wrote in its preface, the rise of art prices “has limited the quantity and quality of acquisitions to the point where we can no longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago.”

AS THE museum’s buying power fades, public experience of art is impoverished, and the brain drain of gifted young people from curatorship into art dealing accelerates. American museums have been hit, in fact, by a double whammy: art inflation and a punitive rewriting, in 1986, of American tax laws, which destroyed most incentives for the rich to give art away. Tax exemption through donations was the basis on which American museums grew, and it is all but gone, with predictably catastrophic results for the future. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them.

The inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. New York’s position as art center of the West was based partly on the range, the scholarship, and the aesthetic importance of its museum shows. There is no question that the last fifteen years in the United States have been the golden age of the retrospective, bringing a sequence of remarkable and (for this generation of museums and the public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of curatorial effort: late and early Cézanne, Picasso, Manet, van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Courbet, Goya, Velázquez, Poussin—and, in 1989, the greatest Cubist show ever held, “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” at MOMA. Most of these trans-Atlantic efforts, if not all, were seen in New York.

This type of serious and argued show must be distinguished from the blockbuster that was so much a feature of American cultural life in the 1970s. Nobody—nobody responsible, anyway—believes anymore that great works of past art should be sent around the world for frivolous or merely political reasons. The blockbuster, that curse of American museology, began with two events: André Malraux’s loan of the Mona Lisa to the United States in 1963 (so that Mona and Jackie could be in the same room at the same time) and the appearance of Michelangelo’s Pieta at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow in 1964, looking like a replica of itself in margarine, the viewers carried past it on a moving walkway. It produced, at its height, frenetic events like Tut, and clunkers like the Metropolitan Museum’s 1983 Vatican show. And it ended with that saturnalia of “heritage” nostalgia, “Treasure Houses of Great Britain,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1988.

THE TIME of the blockbuster is gone, and it is no loss. Yet the loss, or even the winding down, of the great monographic exhibitions will prove very serious. That is what the art market threatens. It is difficult for museums even to contemplate larger retrospectives now, and the 1991 Seurat exhibition arranged for Chicago, New York, London, and Paris may be remembered—if it comes off—was one of the last of its kind. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Van Gogh at Aries” was being planned in the early 1980s, it was assigned a global insurance value of $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of the sale of Portrait of Dr. Gachet, every owner of a van Gogh wants to believe that his or her painting is worth $82 million, and will not let it off the wall insured for less. So the circulation of pictures is slowing down, and the chances are that museums will again have to rely, as they did forty years ago, more on their permanent collections than on temporary shows—with the difference that these collections, too, will be relatively static. What effect this will have on the American museum audience, conditioned to expect the ever changing stimulus of new art events, remains to be seen.

The 1980s showed how the fear of contraction could lead institutions (the Whitney Museum, notoriously) to lower standards of curatorial judgment in the scramble for corporate underwriting and audience pull. The museum’s immersion in the art world as a promotional system reduces its independence of taste; it chooses to mirror “what's happening” for fear that it might seem obsolete. It must take its cues from the market, the main determinant of New York's visual culture in the 1980s. But to invoke “what's happening,” as though the museum were just a mirror, is an evasion. There are about 200,000 artists in the United States, each making (at a conservative guess) fifty or so objects a year. From the homeless proletariat of these 10 million works almost anything may be designated as “happening,” but it is not likely to have any more significance in the long historical run than, say, Charles Jencks’s classification of a previously uncataloged subgroup of Japanese neo-Palladians does in architectural history.

Trends can be condensed at will, and young artists, with careers such as those of Jean-Michel Basquiat or (parody of parodies) Jeff Koons held up before them, are less disposed to accept an ideal of slow maturation. This makes them vulnerable to fashion, prone to seize whatever eye-catching stylistic device they can, no matter how sterile it may be in the long run. The moral economy of the American art world has been so distorted by the hype and the premature careerism of the 1980s that a serious painter in New York must face the same unreality and weightlessness as a serious actor in Los Angeles. The idea of the “cutting edge”—the phrase is still used by some curators—is fatuous, a fossil relic of a belief in artistic “progress” that no one, at the agitated and directionless end of the twentieth century, will defend under its own name.

V.

IN THINKING of centers, we remain fixed on the ancient Roman model of cultural imperium, and tend to overlook the possibility that things can work differently. For centuries, they did—as in medieval and early Renaissance Italy. The slow growth of its city-states tended to emphasize what was native, local, and patriotic. They fought wars, but none of them had the size, the military reach, or the wealth to subjugate the rest. Hence no Italian state at the end of the quattrocento, not even Rome, had the gravitational field of an imperial center of culture.

At the height of Donatello’s career, there were perhaps 65,000 people in Florence. There was a modest international art market. Artists did work in cities other than their own, as Leonardo did for the Sforzas in Milan; but travel was difficult, no image could be mechanically reproduced with accuracy, and museums did not yet exist. (The idea of the traveling show was centuries away.) Hence art tended to focus on specific acts of commemoration and propaganda—this fresco of the Last Judgment for our local church, that statue of the hired general who saved us from the baleful Pisans.

The results were regional in the best sense, in the sense that matters. To this day the ancient cities of Italy, big ones such as Florence or little ones such as Todi, convey a satisfying sense of cultural wholeness—of the full use of culture in the interest of local resources. Strictly speaking, this is a relic; they live in the late twentieth century, like us, and can only preserve what remains of the past without significantly adding to it. But at least one can still see the work there within the frame of the landscape, the vernacular architecture, the roots of its meaning.

WHAT ALTERED this regional ecology of the arts of Italy, and throughout Europe, was the rebirth of ancient Rome. The bones of the empire rose from the soil and reconstituted themselves as an aesthetic imperium. When Italian artists began to take a systematic interest in the relics of antiquity, the classical past was seen to contain whole systems of norms and forms for the present, of an authority not apparent in the Gothic. Very soon the rediscovery of Vitruvius’s writings and the digs in the Forum made the journey to Rome a necessary part of an artist’s education. The Florentine, however much he felt that his city was the best of cities, could no longer believe that its aesthetic resources were going to give him all the language he could use. So he went to Rome—like Alberti, like Donatello, like Piero della Francesca, like Michelangelo.

As soon as artists recognize that a place embodies cultural resources whose truth and efficacy exceed the merely local, no matter how fond they are of their own paese, the idea of the cultural capital is born. Once the stuff of this cultural stimulus is seen, systems of interpretation will form around it—the academies, the art schools. Their monopoly of technique adds to the gravitational field of the capital. And so do the works that the visitors leave. Michelangelo’s Sistine and Paoline frescoes, Raphael's Stanze, became fused with the antique as part of the whole authoritative pattern that later artists come to Rome to experience. Only in the capital could schools of art and bodies of art theory make themselves felt. One of the great benefits of the center is centralized argument.

What could Michelangelo Merisi, growing up in the little northern town of Caravaggio, expect to learn about painting? He had to get to Rome; only Rome could open to him the scale of work and the technical proficiency that he sought. Capitals rejuvenate themselves by this pull. They draw their nourishment from the provinces. Caravaggio, Pietro de Cortona, and the Carracci came to Rome more for its dead artists than its uninspired living ones; most Roman painting in the early seventeenth century was as sunk in affectation as the much-touted transavanguardia of the early 1980s. But in the process they transformed Roman painting, and added to the sense of the center for centuries to come. They also changed the work of other foreigners in Rome, so that the Caravaggian style spread all over Europe.

BY 1670, however, Rome’s decline as a center for living art had begun. It was still obligatory for a serious painter or sculptor to study in this great hive of time, and several more generations of foreigners, from Fragonard and Hubert Robert to the German Nazarenes, did so. But papal patronage slowed after the death of Urban VIII Barberini. There would be no more fresco cycles like Pietro de Cortona’s ceilings for the Barberini Palace; no more architectural projects like Bernini’s colonnades. Perhaps the outstanding work of visual art produced in Rome in the eighteenth century was the huge corpus of etchings by the Venetian architect Giambattista Piranesi, whose obsessive subject is nostalgia: from the scale of those tiny figures picking their way over fallen pediments or dwarfed by the immense vaults of the thermae, we infer an acute sense of lost cultural potency.

When power declines and the center cannot hold, its works of art move into the eddy of the market and wash up where power is great, where money is plentiful, where order reigns. Although the image of Rome as cultural capital survived for centuries, its reality was enacted in Paris. This transfer was the work of Cardinal Mazarin, who took effective control of the French administration in the 1640s and began to move huge quantities of Italian art into France, thereby forming the basis of the state collections centralized in the Louvre.The aesthetic rise of Paris in the seventeenth century had the same epic quality as its political and military rebirth. Before long, a cultivated Parisian could congratulate himself on living in a new Rome, a capital of the arts whose destiny was to be fed by whatever was best in the provinces—the talents of a magistrate’s son from Rouen who became Pierre Corneille, of a boy from Valenciennes named Antoine Watteau.

This confidence in the uniqueness and the supremacy of the capital was reinforced by Napoleon, and by the whole imagery and style of French neoclassicism. It continued to be ratified right through the nineteenth century, up to World War I. The drift of economic history, and the drift of population, fed it, too. France was changing from a nation of countrymen to one of city-dwellers. By 1851 the urban population outnumbered the rural for the first time in France and England. By the 1860s this scheme of opposites—the superiority of the city to the provinces, the hostility of the provinces to the city—was set to become one of the axioms of the modernist creed, and hence of culture itself.

THE IDEA of an avant-garde was born in the nineteenth century, and it was linked to city life. Cities inflicted rapid change on human life. The country stood for slow change, or none at all. The provinces, la France profonde, were inherently conservative; Paris, inherently radical. This image of the dynamic capital set against the torpid provinces was tied into all the main cities of modernism—Moscow and Leningrad, Vienna and Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, New York. But Paris was the place where it was first seen as a great issue. “The interior is going to die,” complained Edmond de Goncourt in 1891, looking at the demolition crews. “Life threatens to become public. I am a stranger to what is coming, to these new boulevards, implacable in their straight lines, which no longer evoke the world of Balzac, which make one think of some American Babylon of the future.”

In this new Babylon, private life gets turned inside out by a new sense of public space. The café and the boulevard are stages that turn life into spectacle. Old social rankings weaken and new ones have to be named by artists—by Degas and Manet, for instance, connoisseurs of the gesture and the passing moment, tracing the fabric of slippages and pretensions. The art of the new Paris, capital of modernism, is fascinated by social ambiguity, with the freedom to make up one’s own life.

The idea of the capital city helped to breed two of the most durable elements in the artistic avant-garde: the sense of not having a fixed self, of being free to invent; and the idea of the artist as subversive. These combined to raise two chief themes of modernist self-awareness in art: disconnection and loss, on the one hand—the loss of a secure social past, of a parental tradition; but on the other hand, artistic self-emancipation. Exchange of information was to the modernist capital what the contemplation of nature was to the eighteenth century. By the end of the 1920s the capital had become a machine designed to contemplate itself, to fill the world with images of itself.

Likewise, modern painting and sculpture were hugely affected by the crowding of resources in the great city. Art has to feed on art. The center would not send things to you—you had to go to it, like Picasso going to Paris from Barcelona in 1900. The forms of fin-de-siècle Paris were to modernism what the marbles of Rome had been to classicism: think only of the Eiffel Tower, or of what Picasso and Braque, in their Cubist paintings, did with the texture of signs and reflections seen in the new Paris street, the billboards, the ads, the newspapers, all the mass-produced imagery of an industrial world. There was no such thing as rural Constructivism or pastoral Futurism. And Paris was the dream city of Surrealism, too.

This fixation on the idea of the capital was carried over to New York City. Forty years ago Manhattan was the capital of change—the Rome of instability. “Tomorrow’s world—today!” The motto of the 1939 New York World’s Fair was also that of America’s growing new-culture industry. Europe, with its more fixed orders, might resist change, thereby creating one kind of avantgardism, in opposition to authoritative culture. But America embraced the new, because its enshrined social and technological myth was one of progress. With a little prodding, it was willing to embrace almost any “radical” cultural change as therapeutic. Its cultural industry was announcing fresh, temporarily unnerving aesthetic changes and telescoping the future into the present. What American was really going to want an academy? Who was afraid of the future? In America the new was strong, tradition (relatively) weak.

Much European modernism, notably Constructivism, had taken its stand on millenarian hope. Abstract art was imagined as the final style, the end of history, in which all tensions and contradictions would be resolved—a religious fantasy at root, like Marx’s fantasy of the withering away of the state after the dictatorship of the proletariat. The tyranny of the past could be counteracted by an equal and opposite reign of the future, by an avant-garde forever gazing ahead to utopian prospects that always recede. But this was not congenial to Americans. Here, avant-gardism embraced a more businesslike model of novelty and diversity, the fast obsolescence of products, the conquest of new markets.

IN THE overcrowded art scene of the 1980s, this would accelerate to the point of hysteria. In the 1950s and 1960s, when there were fewer artists, collectors, and museums, the differences between New York's new-art environment and the “classical” European avant-garde circa 1900-30 were perhaps not obvious, although they certainly became obvious with Pop art. The American idea of avant-garde activity became competitive and inflationary, swollen with excess claims for itself. It still is; but the claims are largely hollow, and the reaction against them, once the false euphoria of the 1980s wears off, will be harsh. In the main, it was a low, dishonest decade for art, American art especially, and part of its dishonesty lay in the pretense that the idea of the “vanguard” still had some relation to aesthetic and ethical values.

Perhaps one of the positive results of the 1980s will be finally to clear our minds of the cant of cultural empire, of nostalgia for the lost imperial center. Under the present circumstances, a great artist can just as easily—and unexpectedly—emerge in Hungary or Australia as in New York. One may bet that in the 1990s the necessary reconstruction work on the strip-mined sites of late modernism will be done in Britain and in Europe, not in the United States. And even there one should not expect too much, or expect it too soon.