Art After the United States

by Jorge Benitez, 2025

The myth of indispensability is difficult to kill. It haunts believers with salvific promises long after it becomes irrelevant. There is no other way with humans. Falsehood is the essence of faith.

As the United States experiments with alternatives to its traditional governance, it becomes imperative that its foundational mythology be analyzed without ideological preconceptions. Partisan reductionism and philosophical biases will neither explain nor resolve the current situation without setting the stage either for its prolongation or for a pyrrhic overreaction. This does not deny the seriousness of unfolding events. Instead, it cautions against falling into a virtuous trap without challenging the forces that seem to threaten liberty. It is therefore essential that the myth of American indispensability be seen as an impediment to a more nuanced understanding rather than as a denial of legitimate and even great American achievements.

In 1945, the main victors among the Allies were the United States, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union. Yet of the three, only the United States was indispensable. It alone had the power, resources, and wealth to help rebuild friends and enemies alike. Despite its size, power, and enormous wartime sacrifices, the Soviet Union had little to offer beyond subjugation, oppression, and poverty. What remained of the British Empire was bankrupt and indebted to the United States. Europe was no longer the center of the world, and for the next 80 years, the once isolated and provincial newcomer would dominate science, technology, politics, economics, and culture from its power centers in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. The American Empire was triumphant. What could possibly topple it?

For over 100 years, Paris had been the center of the art world. It was the birthplace of modernism and the final destination for innovators, eccentrics, and geniuses. In 1945, the Parisian baton would be passed to New York. Amid skyscrapers and increasingly powerful banks, new forms of art emerged to challenge European cultural hegemony. It did not matter that much of the inspiration and precedents had come from Europe. Manifest Destiny had spoken. New York was the New Jerusalem that would redeem the West from the degeneracy of the Old World. Money would ensure success in the global culture war as it had in World War II. Abstract Expressionism would lead the way as the vanguard of the new American Revolution. Unlike the effete Europeans, thoroughly masculine American men would paint boldly with their arms instead of their wrists. They would shed the burden of images and representation to concentrate on pure painting without violating the virginal integrity of the picture plane. All the problems of art would be solved with the same energy and determination that had built the atomic bomb a few years earlier. Such was the American way, and the world would be compelled to follow.

Indeed, the world did follow. The new American art was large, powerful, and intimidating. It projected philosophical depth and historical gravitas with titles such as Man Heroic and Sublime and Elegy to the Spanish Republic. The painters themselves projected seriousness whenever they were sober, especially since they were not above throwing a bourbon-fueled punch if challenged on some aspect of art. Under the circumstances, the myth of their Olympian exploits would emerge to convert young Americans and foreigners alike to the new religion. Art history would call it the New York School.

Jackson Pollock, painting in his studio in East Hampton, New York, 1950. Image courtesy of Britannica.

Among the brawny gods, Jackson Pollock stood out as a would-be Dionysus. From a foreign perspective, if a chain-smoking alcoholic roughneck from Wyoming could rise to prominence by dripping house paint on un-stretched canvases, then anything was possible. By contrast, European modernism seemed as traditional as Raphael. The United States was not only the land of opportunity; it was also the land of unhinged dreams. But there was an unmentioned caveat. The dreams could only succeed through official approval, money, and something close to groupthink. In other words, without a Greenberg or a Rosenberg to grant an imprimatur to the new avant-garde rebels, the rebellion could become neither canonical nor profitable. Europe had always operated on similar principles without pretending to be free. In contrast, Americans sold oppressive novelty as free expression.

Worse still, the theoretical justifications for the new American art were as rigid as the rules that dictated its making. The expression in expressionism was rammed down the throats of students, artists, and the public with fundamentalist zeal and authoritarian inflexibility. The bitter medicine of the New York School was good for the soul and the wallet, and anyone who rejected it was deemed a philistine and cast out into the wilderness like a biblical pariah. This approach was in keeping with an American revolutionary tradition that framed every struggle in religious terms. God was on the side of independence. It did not matter that the real reasons for the rebellion included the takeover of the Ohio Valley, the theft of native lands, the preservation of slavery, or the potential conquest of Canada. The flowery language of liberty was a rhetorical means to a financial end that placed profits on the side of the angels. From political movements to literary styles, there was always a path that led to some moral commandment that justified the new approach. Renewal was inseparable from teleology. Everything had a final end that would resolve all problems either through the fulfillment of religious prophecy or some uniquely American interpretation of the end of history. The trinity of optimism, progress, and individuality was indivisible and sacrosanct, and anyone who defied that faith was un-American. Furthermore, the faith was sufficiently flexible to serve any number of ideologies. Thus the myth of progress could be adapted to any movement that could tap into the bottomless well of possibilities called American Exceptionalism. Regardless of the use or purpose, the results would always be profitability and power. Why should the arts be spared access to the well?

In the case of the New York School, American Exceptionalism served as a moral imperative in the face of a Soviet threat that was, despite revisionist attempts at ridicule, both real and dangerous. Abstract Expressionism provided an antidote to the kitschy, totalitarian vulgarity of Soviet Social Realism. It did not matter that the American artists were mostly on the Left despite the Soviet prohibition of modernism. If anything, such a contradiction was further proof of American Exceptionalism. The United States was so thoroughly free that even the weirdos who worked in opposition to its values were hailed as creative heroes. Under the circumstances, it was perfectly understandable that McCarthyism and State Department support for Abstract Expressionism could be combined with dialectical panache. Both fought the Soviets. Both served American interests. This still left the psychotherapeutic aspect.

Europe had suffered through the Nazi nightmare and the Soviet follow-up. Yet somehow American artists managed to steal the angst. It was a delicious appropriation that spoke to the pretenses of an avant-garde divorced from global reality. Notwithstanding the sacrifices of its armed forces, the United States experienced World War II from a relatively safe distance. Its native-born artists and intellectuals had lived through the Great Depression, but they had not sheltered from massive air raids or been detained and tortured by the Gestapo. In short, they could indulge in existential anxiety precisely because the stakes were low. The rest of the world could barely find food much less dwell on the meaning of flatness. Even American popular culture and literature seemed to mock the reality of daily survival outside the United States with films and novels such as Rebel Without a Cause, The Catcher in the Rye, and other tales of white privilege aspiring to transcendence. Yes, Europe could indulge in existentialism and absurdism without feeling particularly suicidal, but in 1950s New York, meaninglessness was cause for profound depression. Fortunately, the notoriously short American attention span would come to the rescue by the early 1960s with Pop Art and a counterculture determined to lighten the burden of postwar angst. It succeeded in unintended ways.

American movies, fashions, and Rock-and-Roll proved deadlier to Soviet Communism than Abstract Expressionism and nuclear weapons. While Parisian hipsters embraced Maoism in 1968, university students in Prague confronted Soviet tanks with blue jeans, flowers, and an Anglo-American soundtrack. Parisian youth was stuck in the gray past of Marx, Lenin, and Mao while Eastern European youth understood that the American counterculture stood for freedom, if not escape from drabness. American soft power pointed to the future, and in 1989-91 it contributed to the collapse of the Eastern European Communist Bloc. Youthful energy and irreverence had triumphed after all, and by the early twenty-first century that same raucous power would transform the world with smartphones, social media, and streaming services along with the promise and menace of artificial intelligence. From high art to pop culture, the transformative power of American ingenuity seemed destined to eternal indispensability until such time as the American people themselves would choose to turn inward in defiance of all they had achieved, projected, and shared with the world. Few could have imagined how soon and devastatingly Americans would make their choice.

It is impossible to know whether the United States will implode, destroy the global order, or quietly slide into irrelevance. In all probability, the world will survive all three scenarios. If nothing else, the United States will discover that the projection of soft power is inseparable from economic power and its own wellbeing. If American cultural products become prohibitively expensive, due to tariffs or other forms of economic aggression, American cultural influence will decrease throughout the globe. The fine arts cannot escape such a reality. Furthermore, American academic influence will fall prey to an unforeseen contradiction, namely, that American progressive ideas in the arts and humanities will lose their relevance without the promotional backing of American capitalism. In short, the American artistic Left cannot survive without Right-wing capital. The loss of corporate and federal grant money will strip the self-described progressive Left of its current global platform, and Europe, in particular, will not be able to replace it because it questions the American misreading of French postmodernism, which it derisively calls “French theory” rather than théorie française. Europe chafes under the export and imposition of American identity politics, not because the issues are not relevant, but because the American zero-sum approach is ill suited to European complexities. Powers such as Japan and China have little reason to care about the latest American philosophical edicts on race, gender, or sexuality. Latin America increasingly resents what it sees as culturally imperialist efforts to make Spanish grammar conform to American notions of inclusion and gender equality. The French, in particular, view the United States as a Bible-besotted society whose Left sees secular issues through a black-and-white moralistic lens. Understandably, a continent that suffered the horrors of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism has little patience with American revolutionary utopianism and sanctimonious preaching. With a bankrupt Left-leaning intelligentsia and culture industry and a rising Christian fundamentalist cultural establishment, what will Americans export as soft power? This leaves the question of American techno-totalitarianism, itself an extension of American messianic religiosity.

It is wrong to think that American techno-fetishism emerged fully formed from the messianic delusions of the so-called tech bros. Techno-fetishism is as solipsistic as identity politics because it cannot acknowledge anything beyond its walls. It stems from an ancient yearning to transcend the physical world. To that end, the self-styled philosophers of Silicon Valley have consistently written and spoken about their goal of achieving a Platonic society of ones and zeros, a techno-totalitarian world of perfect forms devoid of human messiness. Some of the wealthier and more influential thinkers within the post-human symposium propose the establishment of “corporate monarchies” as a preliminary step toward the achievement of a cybernetic society that could dispense with humans altogether. Such sci-fi-driven goals are inseparable from many of the geopolitical ambitions of an emerging American system that has no need of the arts and humanities. They are also inseparable from a frat-boy culture that exceeds all notions of toxic masculinity. Aside from their power in the realm of cyber-capitalism and an expanding surveillance state, it remains to be the seen whether their policies and influence will make artificial intelligence supreme in the arts and remove the human element from the humanities.

Art after the United States does not imply the end of American artists. Nor does it negate the most important American contributions to world culture. Still, American artists can no longer pretend that the current situation will be resolved through the intervention of heretofore functioning constitutional mechanisms. The separation of powers that defined the American Republic may not survive. Academic and cultural institutions are steadily losing their autonomy and may soon be reduced to organs of indoctrination and propaganda. An exodus of American artists may follow the growing flight of American scientists. The West has not witnessed such a migration of intellectual and artistic power since the Russian Revolution and the rise of Nazism. Yes, there will be American art after the United States, but it will not emerge from its native soil as the once great country learns that it may no longer be indispensable.