Peter Schjeldahl: Out of Time

In art today, Parmigianino figures obviously as a direct influence on what may be termed the neo-Mannerism of the painter John Currin, whose mastery of eclectic styles veers between eloquence and buffoonery. A comedy of confused aims—representation, caricature, poetry, burlesque—may be Currin’s master theme, proposing that the present culture enables nothing more from him and requires nothing less. But I detect a bit of Parmigianino’s anguish in the majority of our most gifted contemporary artists. It is a condition of being all dressed up, in talent and intelligence, with nowhere to go that isn’t the numbingly familiar white space of postminimalist exhibition—a global archipelago of secular chapels that we attend to feel somewhat smart and sort of stimulated, never mind to what end. The strongest values that have real force in art now are talent and intelligence as such, expending themselves in arch charades of secondhand or inchoate meaning, for want of better employment. It’s as if everybody were jockeying for position on a stage where the curtain is always about to rise but never does. The Baroque took hold when Roman patrons, Spanish royals, and Dutch burghers determined, for many and various reasons, that art would be not only an attribute but a mirror of their lives. Our own Parmigianino-esque doldrums will end when cultivated people again know sufficiently, in robust consciousness, who they are and what they want.