The biographical note at the end of Mixed Blessings informs us that Lucy Lippard has written fourteen books. One assumes that the present volume makes it fifteen. In any event, the list of honors and distinctions that follows—honorary degrees, exhibitions that Miss Lippard has organized, publications she has edited or helped to start—reminds us that over the last two and a half decades this prolific “writer and activist” has come to be taken seriously indeed by the “cutting edge” art establishment.

Though she describes Mixed Blessings modestly as an “egalitarian collage,” Miss Lippard frequently pauses to tell readers that she has expended immense effort attempting to register the staggeringly diverse efflorescence of art—or what we might more accurately call art-like phenomenona—in North and Central America “now, in 1990, two years before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s accidental invasion of the Americas.” In other words, Mixed Blessings is meant to be a charter document in the multiculturalist onslaught now besieging us. Miss Lippard likes to be thought of as breaking new ground. So new is the ground she breaks here that language itself threatens to fail her. She wistfully admits this, begging our indulgence for what she accurately sums up as the “web of ungainly, pompous, condescending, and even ugly language” that festoons the book. When one is embarked on such a bold intellectual voyage, what’s a bit of barbarous diction?

Mixed Blessings is not organized chronologically or geographically or thematically. To the extent that it is organized at all, it is organized “conceptually.” The quotation marks are essential, for in proper postmodernist fashion Miss Lippard does not employ concepts, she merely dispenses jargon. Impressive abstractions float about in great profusion, untethered to anything so mundane as reality. The five chapters of the book boast enigmatic titles like “Mapping,” “Telling,” “Naming,” and “Turning Around,” but are basically indistinguishable from one another. Yet the message is clear. “Turnaround,” Miss Lippard explains for the etymologically innocent, “is a literal synonym for ‘revolution.’” And “revolution”—albeit at a safe distance—is Miss Lippard’s real passion, not art. Already in the acknowledgments we read that this book supposedly devoted to new art in the Americas owes much “to the U.S. Solidarity movement with Central America, to the cultural vitality of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the FMLN in El Salvador, and to the vital young artists of Cuba.” When we get to the text proper, we are inundated with one political cliché after the next: “changing demographics make the abolition of Eurocentricism necessary to everyone’s survival"; “the Central-American church divided between corrupt support for U.S.-backed oligarchies and mercenaries and the healing empowerment of Liberation Theology”; “politicized artists concerned with outreach into their communities and the decommodification of art”; “[g]entrification on the multicultural Lower East Side...is a cultural issue like the desecration of indigenous burial grounds and sacred sites”; “[a]ll white people, no matter how well-meaning, are racists to some degree by virtue of living in a racist society.” As Quintilian said about the education of the young orator, without natural gifts technical rules are useless. Miss Lippard clearly has a gift for this sort of thing. It is, to be sure, a narrow gift, but she works it for all it’s worth.

What makes it possible for Miss Lippard to indulge in this orgy of politicized banality is her willed and programmatic blindness to art. In a key passage, she tells us that “The notion of Quality has been the most effective bludgeon on the side of homogeneity in the modernist and postmodernist periods...” That is to say, artistic achievement does not matter, only politics does. Very, very few of the artists discussed in this book will be familiar to most readers. Very, very few of them should be. They have been chosen not for their talent or artistic accomplishment, but for their ethnic heritage and adherence to political sentiments of which Miss Lippard approves. This makes Mixed Blessings worthless as an exercise in art criticism, though alarming as a symptom of cultural decay. It is not a mixed blessing; it is an unmixed disaster.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 5, on page 81
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