Invoking a rhetoric of liberation, a group of West Coast art writers grouped around the essayist Dave Hickey have called for art to engage fully with entertainment and mass culture. In Hickey’s books The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, in the pages of Art issues., and in the work of the Los Angeles Times’ head art writer, Christopher Knight, readers encounter what is put forth as a populist position, one that claims to free art from a series of elites. These elites include that of the art market—the gallerists, artists, and collectors who want to maintain a smug insularity from the “people” and could care less about making, selling, or buying work that engages with a wide audience. Then there is the elite of the “new academy”—the curators, theorists, and historians who would skim off the vitality of art and entomb it in discourse. These are the critics enamored of their own language rather than with elucidating the work, the theorists blind to beauty, the art school faculties intent on insularity and self-reflexivity, and the historians who see only a text in context rather than a painting. This new academy can’t do, so it writes and teaches—and valorizes exactly the artwork that is most like its own practice. And finally, in a reverse bit of liberation theology, art must be freed from artists themselves, especially those who do not wish to make art for a wide audience. These are the whiners and the navel gazers, the women and the multi-culturalists, all ignoring the beautiful in the quest of making some sort of point (and one that probably only the academics will care about).

Yet this call for an engagement, or re-engagement, with entertainment is evidence of an aesthetic politics of exhaustion—Hickey et al. actually show very little faith in art itself, and the broader implications of their quest is retrograde. Furthermore, their notion of entertainment is itself a bit hidebound, as the entertainment they most wish to have art follow seems to be television (that companion for the very young, the very old, and the homebound). These critics want art to be infused with the spirit of what I call Broadcast Romanticism. Like the romantic movement, Broadcast Romanticism sees a great and untapped goodness in the Volk and condemns “high culture” as having become an alien thing, abandoning the ways of the people. Where romanticism tapped into the peasant culture of folklore and craft, Broadcast Romantics wants to draw from and contribute to the “popular culture” of TV, movies, and contemporary music. In television, one of the most sought after qualities is a high Q rating. The Q ratings measure that most homey of attributes: the performer’s likeability—not his or her talent, or even her popularity, but instead the ineffable quality of the performer to engender a warm feeling from the audience. Broadcast romantics want a high-Q art.

But, let us not forget that romanticism led to the worst excesses of 19th century nationalism and the privileging of often mawkish majority taste. Victorian painting functioned at much the same level of taste and content as the popular cultures of literature and music at the time. Both Soviet and Nazi realism were decadent romantic movements. It is coincidentally interesting that both Victorian painting and Socialist realism are enjoying a critical and market renaissance in the 1990s, and that the composer Andrew Lloyd Weber, who knows a bit about entertaining the masses, is a premiere collector of Victorian canvases.

Besides, didn’t we already have what the Broadcast Romantics are calling for in the 1980s? Art was entertainment in those long lost days: Robert Longo made rock videos for New Order, Julian Schnabel posed for Vanity Fair wearing a pair of star shaped red-rimmed sunglasses that looked like he had stolen them from Elton John’s night table, and contemporary art auctions were covered like sporting events. Paul Taylor’s Art After Andy: Soho in 1980s with its breathless intertwining of the cult of art celebrity, the high stakes of the white hot gallery scene, and the overall feeling of important gossip, seems like a chronicle of an ancient past, rather than reportage barely a decade old. Remember the bombast of neo-expressionism, David Salle’s semi-pornographic nudes, the graffiti art of Futura 2000? Well, the Broadcast Romantics seem not to. They should be careful of what they wish for.

Broadcast Romantics have given up on art because they feel that the 20th century was a showdown between art and popular culture, and art lost. This position could be interpreted as a perversely inverted Greenbergianism, or perhaps a defeatist Greenbergianism: if you can’t beat the middlebrow, why not join it. The contemporary cinema has certainly embraced this attitude. Whereas the independent cinema once stood for an aesthetic and a way of seeing the cinema as an art form, contemporary independent filmmakers—at least those on the Sundance circuit—treat their low-budget work as somehow preliminary: their work is not to be followed by others like it but rather by a movement up a scale of size and bombast. The independent cinema is one of calling card films for mainstream work—a farm team for the Industry. It took only three films to take Richard Linklater from filming unknown Austin layabouts in Slacker to lensing (as they say in Variety) hot young stars in Vienna playing at slacking in Before Sunrise.

Who could blame artists for despairing in the face of revanchist aesthetic politics, the evisceration of public funding (and public interest, for the most part) in the US, and the Juggernaut of the entertainment conglomerates? Giving up now is the easy course and no one will blame them—at least today. But those who still keep a glimmer of interest in what used to be called vanguardism and is now in need of a new name (and a new politics), those who are making art that doesn’t necessarily want to be liked (low-Q art, I suppose), and those who believe (against the odds at the present moment) in a redemptive, sometimes oppositional, sometimes simply obsessive kind of artistic practice will be vindicated.