Introduction
Before we start this article, we need to confine ourselves to the definition of The End of American Culture: It doesn't mean that American culture will stop to develop, it does mean that America as the cultural leader and the center of the world is being ended. Since the first half of the 20th century, New York City has replaced Paris playing a key role, as the cultural center of the world. A deep crisis is that American culture has lost its true value of humanity becoming merely the game of concepts and established rules with spiritual immorality in the reflection of the conflicts of a morally decayed chaotic world. Everything is in the process of reformation, human culture today is not an exception.
When we think about the American culture, our mind automatically get connected with those great names as Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko etc. Who can forget the great humanist president Abraham Lincoln? The genius expression of Edgar Allan Poe? The most masculine optimistic imaginative poetry of Walt Whitman? The interesting stories at Mississippi River filled with humanist compassion from Mark Twain? The courage in The Old Man and The Sea of Ernest Hemingway? The sense of freedom from the paintings of Jackson Pollock? No one could doubt that 20th century is an American Century, a century of liberation, a century of freedom. Why is America culturally losing its real value and decaying? What and why this happened here.
If we really want to understand the facts and the conditions today, we must review as well as analyze the history, giving a more accurate evaluation and widen the scope of our investigation from facts to facts.
A brief view of the rising history of American culture
Culturally speaking, the unique American style in literature was much earlier than in art.
In 1832, Edgar Allan Poe began writing short stories – including "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy, had a very strong influence in theory and in practice on French poet Baudelaire and many others.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two of America's greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War, and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself without being egotistical. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me ...". Whitman was also a poet of the body – "The body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh." On the other hand, Emily Dickinson lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day.
Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast – in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir 'Life on the Mississippi' and the novels 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Twain's style influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently humorous changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. The economical and understated style of Ernest Miller Hemingway had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction.He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1952). T. S. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In The Waste Land, he embodied a jaundiced vision of post–World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948.
The first time America art had a strong voice in the years after World War II to exert major influence internationally: abstract expressionism. This term, which had first been used in 1919 in Berlin, was used again in 1946 by Robert Coates in The New York Times, and was taken up by the two major art critics of that time, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. The first generation of abstract expressionists included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and many others also related,were important and influential artists during that period.
Many of the first generation abstract expressionists were influenced both by the Cubists' works (which they knew from photographs in art reviews and by seeing the works at the 291 Gallery or the Armory Show), by the European Surrealists, and by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Henri Matisse. The abstract expressionists decided to try instinctual, intuitive, spontaneous arrangements of space, line, shape and color. Abstract Expressionism can be characterized by two major elements: the large size of the canvases used (partially inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they made for the WPA in the 1930s), and the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and experimental paint application with a new understanding of the process.
The real breakthrough was from Jackson Pollock. From his art, America had an international independent influential milestone. Since then New York became the world art center, replaced Paris, and since then has leaded the world in culture until now.
We can see so many art movements which were the pioneer in the world culture as Color Field painting, Neo-Dada, Post painterly abstraction, Op Art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, Shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction, new movements like Pop Art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism.
Lyrical Abstraction along with the Fluxus movement and Post minimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Post minimalism often incorporated industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse.
Lyrical Abstraction, Conceptual Art, Postminimalism, Earth Art, Video, Performance art, Installation art, along with the continuation of Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Hard-edge painting, Minimal Art, Op art, Pop Art, Photorealism and New Realism extended the boundaries of Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.
Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, especially in the freewheeling usage of paint texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. However the styles are remarkably different. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s painters such as Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean-Michel Basquiat and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.
Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.
Realism has also been continually popular in the United States, despite modernism's impact; the realist tendency is evident in the city scenes of Edward Hopper, the rural imagery of Andrew Wyeth, and the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. In certain places Abstract Expressionism never caught on; for example, in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism.
At the beginning of the 21st century Contemporary art in the United States in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralism. The crisis in painting, current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus to one particular representative value of the age. There is an anything-goes-attitude that prevails; an "everything going on" syndrome without clear direction.It shows that art has lost its direction in culture.
The process of decay
If we study the recent development history of American culture as an entity, you realize that the basic value has been changed, the early true humanist value has been replaced by the emptiness of concepts which was guided by the misleading theory: “Art is a creation” and the arrogantness of its organizers. There were two factors we need to consider: 1, The earliest colonists gained prosperity based on selfishness, cruelty, racial group interests as well as other people's suffering,afterwards they were acting more like selfish nationalists and racists against immigrants, putting their interests over the people of other nations. 2, The early humanists had the ideal to produce equality, freedom, democracy and happiness to all the people in this world. Those two forces were always in battle in the history of this nation, the summit point of the conflicts was American Civil War (1861–1865), and a recent development was the Virginia deadly conflicts of the city Charlottesville's plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee on August 12, 2017. When everything in this nation was fine, the opposed two forces could stay in some point of reconciliation, but in a time of difficulty, they would emerge on the surface and produce a great deal of trouble and chaos.
Why do we analyze this? Because the rise of American culture was based on the humanistic value, not otherwise. Those values which touched our hearts, liberated our feelings of freedom, emancipated our passion and imagination to a brighter future by announcing that everyone in this world has the right to chase happiness. People from all over the world were touched by the deep humanistic compassion and love by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Art, in the early 20th century, carried out this precious humanist value, embraced and opened to the whole world, and then, developed an independent American vision. We can regard the art of Pollock as a symbolic gesture of liberation, freedom and passion, we can also see those values on the works of de Kooning, Rothko and many others who were probing the true human spiritual value in vision. Dadaism was the first sign of decay, but Andy Warhol was a real turning point when he used machine products to replace human creation. Guided by the theory: “Art is creation”, everyone in art wanted to break the boundary, “Break the Boundary” itself became art, with the slogan: “Everything could be art”, artists were searching wasted garbage for “ found objects”. Notable universities such as Harvard University and Princeton University produced a lot of curators to major museums as well as art institutions from their Art History Departments, deftly followed out those art rules or guidelines to bring “new art” to this world without the care of humanistic value. Guidelines were priority and all. The job of a curator was well known as a lazy job. We could not see humanism anymore, what we truly saw was the most eccentric conceptual games in circus where human beings were treated as fools. If everything could be art, there would be no art anymore, the same logic was, if everyone was an artist, there would be no artists. Artist, basically, is a title to those people who has devoted their life to art. We wanted to see true creation, we wanted to see true passion, we wanted to see true imagination and true devotion, but we failed to do so. What we saw were the odd colorful new toys in museums for children, besides, being a useful propaganda, art in America has been kidnapped by political as well as national issues for more than a decade. It has lost its own independent identity in the case as a useful tool in favor of politics and national interests, but remember great art always stands for universal value of humanity that is always-go-beyond the boundary of a nation, always-go-beyond the limitation of its culture.
The pluralism in the 21st century Contemporary art in the United States with an anything-goes-attitude exactly demonstrates American art has lost its guidance and central value. It was said art is dead by someone, but the real death was the American humanist spirit. Art is not a creation, art is a spiritual and emotional creation, which means not any creation is art, the creation has to be deeply connected with human life and spiritual personalities to become art. Concept is concept, only if it is deeply touched by human spirituality the concept could be art. When we used machines and everyday found objects with witty designs as art to replace human creations, we are closer to the playground of games than closer to art self.
We need these new guidance for art in the 21th century: 1. we reject that any creation without human spirituality is art. 2. we reject that any creation made by machine, without direct human spiritual activity is art. 3. we reject that any new found objects without deep personal reflection and confection is art. 4. we reject that pure concept without the stains of personal life is art. 5. we reject that useful and beautiful design is art. 6. we reject that art will go to an end. 7. we reject that new art classified in material area, if it does not carry new spirituality. 8. we reject the idea anything could be art.
True art has to be deeply rooted in humanity. In order to be art one has to be deeply touched by human life with emotions, spirituality, wisdom, passion, imagination, devotion in the process of creative activities.
The decay of American century was rooted in the decay of American humanist value in culture. If America wants to be great in culture again, it has to restore its early humanist value that was founded by its political, cultural pioneers. To achieve this, international humanism has to overcome nationalism and racism, only by this way, America is able to embrace a bright future.
Culture in the 21th century - After America Era
The rise and collapse of a nation or a civilization is essentially rooted on its culture, not on politics or the strength of power, which is only appearance. Right now we are in the swamp of a cultural chaotic world. The old cultural structure collapsed, the new cultural value has to be established. Culture in the 21th century is entering into an After-America-Era. A New Humanist Movement is urgently in need to recall the true human value in culture in the worldscope where its central value is characterized by mutual prosperity and harmonial coexistence among different civilizations or nations, beyond any past cultural structures of self-centered as well as power-oriented, It is a non-centered-cultural-era After-America-Era, an era of a higher, and also different scope of civilization has to be constructed to lead the whole world to prosperity, otherwise this world will remain in a brutal, chaotic darkness. To move forward, the new world leading culture must be close to the need of humanity. From the history we recognize that all civilizations, neglecting and manipulating by arrogantness, the concern of the majority of people would be abandoned in the end.
Western culture has ruled the world more than a century with great achievements in that period, but also proved its shortcomings. It was always self-centered and based on the strength-of-power. The democracy system never had harmonial and equal relations with other cultures and civilizations on this planet earth. In the new era of 21th century, we, human beings, need to have the wisdom to stay together in harmony on this earth which becomes smaller with the advance of science. We must learn how to live together with peace and respect. In this situation, Confucianism may be the rescue because it is about a world of mutual beneficial coexistence of harmony, not a world of confrontation and antagonism as in the western culture. It is about tolerance, without dividing friends and enemies, to resolve the cultural and political conflicts brought about by the conflict between religions and civilizations, to provide a comparative advantage for the major problems from nations and peoples, and to firmly support a peaceful dialogue in human cultural and political life. At this point, the old Confucianism must go beyond its original and national limitation to be modernized with the western idea of equality of humanity, democracy and freedom, providing peaceful sunshine for all people with different religions and cultures, avoiding conquest and antagonism. As Confucius stated: “We are in harmony even though we are different” ；“If there is something you don't like others put on you, don't do that to people either.” With the modernized Confucianism, we do understand the difference, we do respect the difference, more over we do appreciate the difference which makes this world more colorful and interesting. The harmonial mutual prosperity will emerge from a dream to reality.
The culture in the 21th century After-America-Era should be a culture deeply rooted in humanity with all the thoughts, emotions and colors of the world, to explore the unlimited potential of human spirit, life and imagination into an eternal , prosperous future.
（Liao Shutao, artist, independent thinker, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world）
