Yes, that whole mentality made art education a joke. And it pissed me off as a student. Sitting in a seminar was a bore. It amonted to listening to people parsing color... I revolted against it and set about to make my mind clear and as articulate as I could about the art I liked and what was going on in it that I liked. Once I got out, I had to re-educate myself. The central problem with abstraction was its abandonment of narrative and reliance on formal elements in a purified asethetic---which turned painting into decor---a product for interior designers to sell their clients. This was the core of art education in an era that was screaming for narrative. Jazz or some of it and film were much better teachers on how to balance formal foundational shifts and content along with it.
``I think an equally important contribution from him was queering up the art world. He couldn't hang at the Cedar Tavern with Pollock and the rest getting into fistfights.''
I got to know an old broke down AE painter and occasional writer critic for the Arts and Art News. He hated Warhol. One of Hub's habits from his NYC bar days was to challenge you to a punch in the chest contest. Anyway, analyzing him and his raw masculinity was an interesting task. A lot of these guys got out of WWII and went to art school like my stepfather. Hub did the same. Homosexuality scared them and they were hell bent on proving art was something for real men. Their masculinity was a big component in their lives and work. You can see it in the sort of hyper-masculinity of the early AE school. It appears in the way the paintings are made, very physically demanding and the use of tools from the house painter trades. I asked Hub, how does Rothko get those surfaces. He said, He uses a roller. They didn't even like the word artist. So they used painter.
The women artists of the era all noted this men-only club system: Louise Nevellson, Lee Krasner, Georgia O'Keeffe, etc.
I can see this whole sexual dynamic, because the arts in the US in their time (and early mine) were considered unacceptible on many levels. Painters, musicians, actors, writers, especially dancers the whole spectrum was something of an offense to the reigning middle class male sensibility. Queer was only one of a dozen different reasons families had for not wanting their sons to go into the arts. Just being smart/articulate was another suspect characteristic. We talk about the anti-intellectualism of the US as if it was a cultural or national failing, but its built into the social institutional fabric in the dynamics of families, schools, the entire economic system in a dozen different ways.
Public higher education system mostly got rid of their art departments a long time ago. During the early 90s recession, the UCB art dept tenured faculty of about a dozen took the golden parachute. It's down to about four with temporary and adjuncts filling in. Art history was turned out of its wing in Kroeber and now hides in tiny offices in the bowels of Doe Library upstairs in the old wing.
CG