Modernism does not eschew theatricality. It is hostile to a certain kind of theatricality, the theatricality of the ancien régime, the theatricality of sentiment and the picturesque. This is at the root of the idea of banishing “illusionism.”

Modernist theatricality is the theatricality of realism.

Realism is deceptive because it poses as something like honesty, as disdain for theatricality. But the real that realism constructs is as much a fiction as the scenic or the picturesque.

So modernist theatricality is a theatricality of honesty, the staging of unstaginess. And yet, it yields very odd, very stilted results. This is already evident in Cezanne, particularly, in his Bathers. Every mark in the painting reveals itself as mark and the surface as remorselessly flat but the bodies and faces of the bathers suffer mutilations prefiguring those that will appear with greater cruelty in Picasso’s Demoiselles.

Postmodernist theatricality is a late-stage inversion of norms. The labored modernist upendings of ancien régime artistic conventions have been academicized to the point where a systemic perversity becomes the deadening norm. So everything formerly bad becomes good in a thoroughly institutionalized way.

Alfred Jarry once observed that an anarchist army could be just as disciplined as any other: The anarchist sergeant just has to bark “Left turn!” and the anarchist soldiers crisply pirouette to the right.

Postmodernist theatricality is the theatricality of a surrender to the imperatives of consumerism staged to look like licentious, anarchic excess, something Deleuze and Guattari in their own frenzied Oedipal effort to bugger Freud failed miserably to understand. The consumer is, indeed, a “desiring machine.” That is what capitalism has reduced him to and like Senatspräsident Schreber this desiring machine can, within the confines of its Matrix-like hallucinatory cocoon, cultivate limitless but inconsequential perversities because its machinic desire is the charge that animates the greater, enclosing machine that is capitalism, of which the hapless schizo consumer is but a dumb cog. In other words, postmodernism is the theatricality of a “counterculture” mesmerized, like the vagabond couple in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, by the coyness of disaffection.

No doubt, there are other types of theatricality. I don’t think theatricality in itself has any bearing on the validity of any type of art.

When he wrote “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried was grasping at straws. Yes, Judd’s and Morris’ and most of Smithson’s output was vacuous, but it should have been possible to say this without the tortured invoking of theatricality as the reason for its vacuity. Fried , however, wanted to denounce the banality of formalism’s inevitable progression into “literalism” without abandoning the sterile formalist criteria he inherited from Greenberg, criteria that were sterile not because form is unworthy of care but because Greenberg, in his effort to oppose kitsch with his anemic version of modernism, reduced formalism to a mechanistic “entrenchment” of “competence” that solicited nothing but straining after minute technical innovations.

A cogent argument against literalism would have required from Fried a declaration that art is essentially symbolic and cannot be reduced to a dumb thing. Art’s fundamental relationship is with the sacred. Throughout “Art and Objecthood” you can see Fried sidle up to acknowledging that art is spiritual without, however, being able to openly say so.

What stopped him?

I believe it was two things: a formalism fixated on “opticality” that foreclosed any acknowledgment of what in art transcends eye candy, and, related to this, the sheepishness that afflicts any critic who needs to preserve an aura of modern, therefore agnostic, sophistication and eschew vulnerability to “mystical” ideas. And yet we know that at its origin, formalism was expressly formulated by Mallarmé and others as a refuge for what remained of the sacred in a world overwhelmed by crass materialism and the bourgeois instrumentalization (and excrementalization) of everything.

Fried’s problem was that he was trying to stave off the final step in the degeneration of a formalism already desacralized by Greenberg. By the time Fried intervened to arrest its slide into total banality, formalism was beyond redemption, and his only recourse was to propose as alternative to the vacuity of Donald Judd the vacuity of Anthony Caro.

Theatricality is the least of art’s faults. When art loses its once-sacred purpose, it itself becomes an agent of spiritual degradation. This is the truth that Fried could not speak.