The Vanishing of American Reverence: Where Have All the Artists Gone?

Picture yourself paused mid-stride on any corner in America, perhaps where the crosswalk button pulses beneath your thumb, or where the shadow of a traffic light pools at your feet, imagine a stranger approaching with that peculiar urban urgency, asking you to conjure the name of an American artist. Not just any artist, mind you, but one whose name has settled into the collective consciousness like sediment in still water, becoming part of the cultural bedrock even if you couldn’t summon a single brushstroke or sculpture from memory’s gallery. The chances are good—perhaps better than your ability to name the city councilperson whose decisions shape the very sidewalk beneath your feet—that some name would surface, Pollock, perhaps, or Warhol, their syllables carrying the weight of recognition.

However, here lies the curious melancholy of our moment: what are the odds that your artist rose to prominence in these last twenty-four years, in this quarter-century that has witnessed the most profound technological and cultural transformation in human history?

During those electric decades of the early to mid-20th century. When America was still discovering its voice in the chorus of global art, the cultural landscape trembled beneath a seismic awakening. Artists emerged like prophets from the urban wilderness: Jackson Pollock with his gravitational dances across canvas, Keith Haring sketching subway hieroglyphs that pulsed with the rhythm of the city above, Georgia O’Keeffe opening flowers like secrets in the desert light, Andy Warhol transforming soup cans into cathedral windows of consumer consciousness, and Jean-Michel Basquiat crowning his canvases with the raw theology of street wisdom. These artists didn’t merely create art; they reimagined what art could be in a postmodern, neo-expressionist portrait, weaving raw personal emotion with cultural activism into tapestries that sang against the duplicity of McDonaldization—a flattening of identity into commodity, the reduction of soul into brand.

They were not simply artists; they were voices rising from the American throat, finding their footing in the fertile foundations laid by their realist, landscape, and modernist ancestors. Edward Hopper had taught them about urban loneliness, Norman Rockwell about the mythology of everyday life, Mary Cassatt about intimate tenderness, and Grant Wood about the dignity of rural simplicity. Winslow Homer showed them the sea’s eternal conversation with shore, Augusta Savage carved dignity from marble and prejudice alike, George Bellows captured the brutal ballet of city life, Marsden Hartley painted landscapes that breathed with spiritual intensity, Jacob Lawrence chronicled the Great Migration in panels that moved like music, and Milton Avery distilled color to its essential poetry.

American art, centuries behind its European, Asian, and African counterparts in the grand conversation of human expression, exploded into the cultural landscape with a reverent force that seemed to shake the very foundations of artistic tradition. Their names drifted through café conversations like smoke, echoed in classroom discussions, whispered in library corners, and rang out across bar tops where artists and dreamers gathered to argue about beauty and truth. They were present, and not just in galleries and museums, but in the living, breathing consciousness of a culture coming into its own.

Yet something shifted with the deaths of Warhol and Basquiat in 1987 and ‘88, as if the last guardians of artistic reverence had departed, leaving behind a vacuum where once there had been gravitational pull. Reverence, it seemed, died with them, buried beneath the weight of what followed. Around the turn of the millennium—that arbitrary but psychologically potent moment when humanity reset its calendars—a new ideology emerged with the seductive whisper of democracy: everyone is an artist. Explore who you are, the voices proclaimed, and your art will follow like a faithful dog. It was a beautiful idea, glazed in its optimism, until it wasn’t.

The internet age arrived with the subtlety of a flood, bringing smartphones that turned every pocket into a darkroom, social media platforms that transformed every wall into a gallery, and the peculiar cult of blamelessness that absolves us all of the burden of mastery. A new, everyman style of post-romanticism, post-expressionism took hold. This wasn’t the raw, honest exploration of self that had characterized the great movements; this was something more manufactured, more performed. Suddenly, everyone was an artist, and so, by the inexorable logic of dilution, no one was.

Over these past two decades, American art has continued its evolution, shaped by the relentless forces of technology, globalization, and shifting cultural norms, with artists like Kerry James Marshall achieving recognition as one of the leading contemporary artists of his time. Social media promised a gift of democratization: in theory, diverse voices could finally be heard, where the gatekeepers could no longer determine who deserved to be seen. However, in practice, too many shared not the raw expression of self that we had cherished in Basquiat’s crowns and Pollock’s cosmic spillings, but rather the carefully curated image of the tortured artist. We weren’t exposed to authentic expression; we were exposed to interpretation, to the projection of favorite artists filtered through the lens of contemporary performance.

The unspoken mantra became: “I don’t want to show you me; I want to show you the image of Basquiat through me.” We wanted to be Bob Dylan, the musical mystic; Jack Kerouac, the literary wanderer; Basquiat, the crowned painter; Byron, the scandalous poet; James Dean, the beautiful rebel. But we didn’t want to be any one of our tormented masters. We wanted to be all of them simultaneously: the musician, the writer, the painter, the poet, the actor, the Instagram philosopher, the TikTok sage. Yet we had nothing to say that we hadn’t already compressed into 280 characters, nothing to express that couldn’t fit into a smartphone screen. We were checking our devices every few minutes to soothe attention addictions that gnawed at us like phantom hunger, so we tied strings to cigarette butts in gallery corners, recreated Warhol’s soup cans with the mechanical rigor of photocopiers, and printed strained political statements on T-shirts that would be forgotten before the next trending hashtag.

A handful of us might recognize the names Jeff Koons, JonOne, and Shepard Fairey: artists who have achieved a kind of contemporary visibility. We might double-tap anonymous paintings and mixed-media pieces that trend today and vanish tomorrow like digital mayflies. Some contemporary artists, such as Banksy and KAWS, have gained recognition, their work commanding attention in both traditional and digital spaces. But what happened to the masters who carve their signatures into the cultural consciousness like Pollock’s drips, who leave easter eggs of recognition scattered through the collective memory, crowns etched into the hidden niches of history? What happened to our mentors, our role models, our examples of artistic fulfillment that transcend the marketplace of attention?

The household names of respected craftspeople have all but disappeared, dissolved into the democratic soup of social media, where everyone’s voice carries equal weight and therefore no voice carries any weight at all. Reverence has been lost to the complex weaves of social resentment. That peculiar modern emotion that simultaneously demands equality while resenting excellence, that insists we are all equally exceptional in our determined un-exceptionalism. A quarter of a century is a long time to wander without artistic guides, without those towering figures whose very existence challenges us to reach beyond the comfort of mediocrity.

And how impoverished our culture has become in their absence, a truth so stark and troubling that I confess I’m not excited to discover just how deep this poverty runs, or how much deeper it might go before we remember what we’ve lost and begin the long work of finding our way back to reverence.

The silence where their voices should be echoes through gallery spaces and coffee shops alike, a reminder that in our rush to democratize art, we may have forgotten that some voices deserve to be heard above the din, that some hands deserve to be watched as they work their particular magic, that some eyes see things the rest of us need them to show us. The question that haunts me, standing in this cultural moment like a traveler lost in a familiar city, is whether we still possess the capacity for the kind of reverence that transforms mere technique into transcendence, mere expression into art that changes how we see ourselves and the world we inhabit together.