Editor’s Note: This text was previously published on December 13th 2024 @ Manhattan Art Review.
It’s funny, if not surprising, that whenever I’ve had a twinge of anxiety about missing out on shows lately, I check SeeSaw and find I’m not missing anything at all. Downtown is a particular pile of shit, where there’s somehow still new galleries opening as more of the few spots that were worth checking out close down or water down their programming to keep afloat. I’ve always thought it was weird that the corner of Henry and Pike has been treated like the scene hotspot for the last couple of years, but I guess even Blade Study looks visionary in comparison to all these new places without even a pretext of curatorial sensibility showing more ugly neon figurative paintings. For the most part I’ve treated these indistinguishable non-spaces as being beneath criticism, and they are, but what used to be the ignorable flotsam has started to feel more like a rising tide. I’ve always tried to stick to shows that had at least a claim to some kind of relevance, but that’s quickly becoming too high a standard. It’s not particularly insightful to say contemporary art is plagued by ignorance and amnesia and is therefore incapable of creating any sense of real value. A system that has no interest in fostering artistic talent is not likely to produce many talented artists. The gallery system still knows how to convince people to buy what they’re selling in the short term, but the basic idea of earning a long career through artistic merit turns into hot air when mega-galleries and the market are capable of making collectors think the worst art you’ve ever seen is worth buying because it costs millions. It’s a scary state of affairs when we can even look back on the cynical bubble of Zombie Formalism with some kind of rose-tinted nostalgia (it at least had the pretense of some rising stars), but here we are in a rudderless art market with no semblance of a real art world to go along with it. It’s no surprise that I think criticism is the lacking ingredient in this recipe, but what I’d like to address here is not yet another defense of criticism but a critique of existing critical outlets for failing to provide the substance of art criticism. By this I don’t mean the sclerotic establishment publications or Cultured‘s half-assed attempt to revive mainstream criticism, none of which I would consider approximations of criticism even on their best days, but of the more independent and subcultural projects. This might seem petty, and maybe to some degree it is, but I also get the sense that “criticism” as an idea is rapidly gaining traction with no accompanying understanding of what it should be doing. I’m sure no one else is going to hold any critics accountable, so it might as well be me. Anyway, critiquing the critics is a good place to start if we want a functional arts discourse.
I realized on my way to the Morgan Library the other day that there are three separate institutional exhibitions in Manhattan about women involved in art in the early 20th century: The Morgan has one on Belle da Costa Greene, the librarian who built their collection, at MoMA there’s another on the collector Lilie P. Bliss, and NYU’s Grey Art Museum has one on the dealer Berthe Weill. The Morgan exhibition is less focused on the collection than I had hoped, and I only passed through before seeing the Kafka show, but Greene’s life as a white-passing black woman is exceptional enough to justify a biographical exhibition. By contrast, I would have been bored to death by the Kafka exhibit if I didn’t love him enough to be thrilled by seeing the manuscripts for The Castle in a vitrine. I haven’t seen the other two yet; the Weill looks promising and focused on the art whereas the Bliss seems boring, taking some of the most familiar paintings in the MoMA collection and padding them out with her biography, which I can’t imagine is anywhere near as interesting as Greene’s. I’m not against exhibitions of this sort by any stretch, but they emphasize a glaring obverse, namely that museums don’t seem to think it’s appropriate to just teach their audience about the art in their collection. MoMA might be all set on the public’s reaction to Starry Night but most people need help with Synthetic Cubism or Cézanne’s The Bather that they’re not liable to get from the institution. That’s a tall order, so I’m not really holding it against the institutions themselves, I just mean to point it out as symptomatic of a larger trend, which is my main point: there’s no received tradition of art appreciation left, and that as much as anything reduces art to an empty shell game. That’s no revelation, but my frustration is that the people ostensibly defending art against its degradation are by and large no less alienated from a meaningful engagement with art than everyone else.
To be clear, I don’t consider myself exempt from this. In comparison to the art writers I like to read like Thomas Crow, Leo Steinberg, Michael Baxandall, T.J. Clark, Michael Fried, Meyer Schapiro, Greenberg, etc., let alone Diderot, Baudelaire, or philosophers on art, I’m well aware of my lack of rigor and writerly ability. On the other hand, I also know that if I have any particular distinctiveness as a writer it’s because I’m self-taught and any art history program that might have given me more practical skills would have smothered my sense of critical value. Academia doesn’t seem capable of producing good writers anymore, but dilettantism is just another failing. The great insurmountable difficulty of art writing today is the lack of a conventional language for the discussion of art, simply as a basis for communication. I can’t begin to touch the grace of Steinberg’s prose, but writers today, even academics, don’t have the fundamental toolkit that he developed into such a precise implement. I might quibble with the commonplace of always shoehorning Picasso’s biography in to any discussion of his work, for instance, but Steinberg knows the line between using background to emphasize something about the artwork under examination and using rote platitudes to inflate the artist’s mythology. He manages this because he’s a gifted reader of images who knows how to discuss specific details to bring out the painting’s effects to the viewer, and I have no idea how to do that. I’m not much of a visual analyst and I don’t know how to stare at a Tintoretto for an hour, but that’s a learned skill that you can’t really pick up without an intensive traditional education. I’m not sure you can get a good classical art-historical training anywhere these days. Steinberg doesn’t consider himself a judging/evaluative critic, but I’d contend that that was his privilege as someone with the knowledge and erudition (and the range of canonical subjects to cover) to not need to evaluate art. In our era we can’t fall back on our learned faculties to discuss art, when no one is particularly erudite and very little of the art being made rewards close reading, so we’re forced to rely on our judgments to piece together some kind of an understanding, if only intuitively. That’s not to say that all judgments are made equal, because subjective taste is always conditioned by history. Everyone’s biases are formed contingently, from the philosophy of the professor you liked in college to your nostalgia for the music that was on the radio in middle school, but the task of the critic is to develop an informed self-awareness that works against that personal bias to engage with the historical consensus of what’s been considered great art in the past and attempt to recognize a continuity of value that determines all of them. That’s a contentious statement, but if the last hundred years have taught us anything it’s that we are trapped in history. The thing about avant-gardists that tried to break with the past up until the ’70s is that they were among the last artists to receive a historical convention to break from. Younger artists since then have received vanguardism as tradition, but it doesn’t work anymore because there’s nothing left to push against and no structure to receive except a distrust of structure. The presumption was that the deconstruction of old oppressive social structures would result in a thriving egalitarianism, but that hasn’t come to pass, sadly. Instead of creating new, more just and humane edifices, our fragmented society is all the more dominated by crassly atomized individualism, ever more fickle and short-lived fashion cycles, capitalism, etc., and the only possible way out I see is relearning a historically grounded sense of judgment, developing an understanding and appreciation of art as a firsthand experience in the present. By advocating for history I don’t mean a reactionary traditionalism; I’m only arguing that a broad knowledge of the past is a necessary basis for navigating the present and mitigating our cultural amnesia. What criticism should do, then, is edify in writing both the experiential side of art and the learning necessary to foster a love of art, which comes as much from denigrating art’s failures as it does from supporting its successes.
As I was reading Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life recently, I had a banal thought about why 19th-century Paris looms large in our imagination as the origin of modernity: it’s not just because it very arguably was, but because so much scholarship in the last fifty-odd years has been dedicated to exploring the complexities of what that means and how it happened. By reifying the period they’ve made it actually more real, which encourages further engagement with it, etc. On the other side of that we have our own recent history, which seems to be forgotten before there’s even a chance to remember it. I’ve been thinking a bit about the way culture in the early 2010s has been more or less scrubbed from our memories just on the relatively mainstream level of stuff like Die Antwoord or even fucking Animal Collective being big compared to the cookie-cutter pop star system we have now, or generally the optimism and weirdness that was so easy to take for granted then. It’s still a nascent subject in my mind, and this Caesura article from 2016 by Bret Schneider does a good job of diagnosing the post-internet era’s then-impending ephemerality due, in part, to a lack of substantial criticism to theorize its ramifications. Eight years later, it reads something like a warning sign at the entrance of the tunnel we’re stuck in; the same problem is still there, only the rot and mildew has set in. I highly recommend it, but for our purposes the subject at hand is Dean Kissick and his Harper’s cover story (link above) that’s been getting so much attention lately. Leaving aside the degree to which he was, ahem, “inspired” by my own writing, his biggest problem is that he’s a product of that heady post-internet period when ignorance was bliss, a mindset he still believes in and which leaves him incapable of making sense of the decline, or the downward spiral, if you will, over the last eight years. What I always enjoyed about his Spike column was his unconscious, pathological refusal to make sense of what had happened to culture even though that was his explicit goal, and he still has his blinders on. To be fair, the blatant subtext of his new article, “art was exciting when I was in my twenties, now I’m forty and dissatisfied,” is a cliché that’s somewhat offset by it being truer when applied to the last twenty years than any other twenty year span in the last century. I’ve seen probably a half-dozen responses to the article shrugging off his complaints as a normal consequence of aging, but “99% of art has always been crap, stop complaining” is no less of an oversimplifying truism than middle-aged disenchantment is. Most of all, Dean yearns for those days when the aesthetic curation of cultural signifiers and scrambled references could and often did feel “new,” when the internet made life feel consistently surreal and crazy. I personally didn’t think much of DIS or most of that stuff during the time, but I can’t deny that it had the atmosphere of an exciting new phenomenon to which our current moment pales in comparison. Where Dean runs into trouble is that he lacks the historical context to see either the fragile, irretrievable contingency of culture and technology when the early stages of online brain rot felt like a kind of afflicted euphoria on the one hand, or the limitations of the trippy hedonist culture it created on the other. Like mass hysteria or an acid trip, none of that enthusiasm toward being weird on the internet actually amounted to much, as everyone realized after the 2016 election that “corporate aesthetics” was never going to deterritorialize the flows of money from the financial sector to your artist friends whose practices mostly consisted of saving JPEGs on the desktop of their MacBook Air. It was an uncomfortable realization at the time for most people, myself included, but it was a necessary disillusionment. Art shouldn’t open “portals into the mysterious,” or at least not so readily as it did from 2010 to 2016. It’s only with some effort that I can dimly recall a time when the literal recycling of pop culture with a perfunctory painterly element by someone like Sam McKinniss felt like something with cultural currency, but I can remember it, with a mixture of surprise and distress. Less dismissively, Pierre Huyghe is probably the “major” artist most emblematic of this trend; a faux-classical reclining nude with a beehive on its head hit so different in 2012 you can’t even imagine… That sense of significance was, in retrospect, incredibly easy to come by. All you had to do was post the stupidest picture you could think of on Instagram, find the newest Soundcloud rapper, wear clothes that shouldn’t go together, do some drugs, etc., and you were just about set. Our cultural consciousness was breaking apart into a million pieces, and it made for a brief feeding frenzy on detached signifiers as they dissolved, leaving us in the void we have now. It may have worked for a bit, but it was facile. Dean wants art to blow his mind, change his life, rip him to shreds, carry him to the top of the mountain. At its best, when you’re young, or high, art can make you feel like it could do that to you, but it can’t, not really. The feeling that it could is real, though, and that’s the content of art. It’s a glimpse of something beyond mundane reality, but it’s never more than a fleeting moment, a shred of a corner of the scope of unrealized possibility. It never turns into a whole new world. This Adornian conceit of art as the yearning for an impossible utopia is much harder to work with than Dean’s platitudes of transcendence, which does something to explain his relatively mainstream popularity. But his perplexed inability to conceive of any tangible differences between the state of art from fifteen years ago to now besides “good crazy internet” and “bad identity politics” is what leaves his argument open to accusations of racism because, in the absence of a more nuanced distinction, it is kind of racist. I don’t think either condition encourages good art, but to conflate trends with some kind of fundamental artistic value is ignorantly categorical in the manner of racism. Identity politics didn’t “ruin” art in any determinate sense, it’s just a very convenient narrative for liberal institutions to shill bad art to liberal elites. The norms of engagement with art have been lazy and superficial for a while, identity is just the newest smokescreen. I doubt a subliminal right-reactionary message was his conscious intention, but I get the sense that Dean believes so strongly in the preeminence of his first-person experience that he doesn’t know how to look past his own nose to a larger conception of things, and that has certain consequences. The internet-art era wasn’t very good and the woke-art era is worse; both fundamentally misunderstand art by rejecting it as a discipline that has to be learned. The former favored ahistorical individualism under the guise of a tech-mediated proliferation of inexhaustibly subjective experience, the latter an ahistorical individualism under the guise of an empowered identity, i.e. “my art is valid because I am a _______.” These are simplistic stereotypes of both eras, and neither precludes the possibility of a talented artist arising from either context, but they also broadly encouraged the simpleminded sense of artistic entitlement that’s endemic to a post-critical art world. That presumption of meaning is the underlying problem that Dean’s critique can’t account for, because he’s at most a “culture critic,” not an art critic, so he doesn’t know how to process art except as the excitement of new pop-cultural phenomena. He’s still looking for the next trend, even though those waves of pop kitsch as art crested a decade ago.
Dean’s midlife art crisis is a simple, familiar one: like many people in the art world, his life and career may be organized around art but he’s not really interested in it, per se. It’s the thing he pokes around in to find material, but his interest in art doesn’t go beyond it existing as a given. That seemed to be a common crisis during the Covid lockdowns, when many artists and art world people, extricated from the social system of openings, after parties, gossip, being emotionally abused at their gallery job by the directors, etc., woke up out of a stupor and wondered why they bothered with any of this drudgery in the first place. It’s easy to be drawn to the freedom of being an artist when you decide to go to art school, or the parties and the possibility of fame and success in your twenties, but once the dour reality of the art system sets in and you’re no longer young it’s significantly harder to be optimistic. A real, lasting engagement with art is no simple pleasure; the enjoyment is always fraught and fleeting, not an ever-deepening transcendental experience. A belief in the possibility of unceasing harmony and beauty can only be sustained by naive ignorance, like that of a new-age pseudospiritual positivist or a romantic narcissist. Art’s aspiration may be toward an ideal, but that ideal is not attained more readily as one studies more thoroughly. On the contrary, the greatest joys of art are those of first exposure, like most joys. There’s a real excitement in understanding something new about art, but there aren’t an infinite number of new worlds to be discovered. After you first grasp abstract painting or conceptualism or the Baroque, every subsequent experience becomes a more familiar repetition of a theme; even transcendence can become a conventional experience. This is an unavoidable fact of aging and maturity, no matter how much anyone may try to avoid it. The challenge is to resist this repetition becoming dullness and drudgery by an investment of interest in the process itself, which in this case we could call a love of art. The love is for the intricate particularities of art’s function in the case of specific artworks, an artist’s work in general, what it was in a specific era, sustained attention and the incremental process of understanding, not being pulled out of your shoes into a revelation of the face of god on a weekly basis. What a critic should offer is a sense of that familiarity with art’s nature and substance, its intangible but recognizable qualities. Dean’s confusion seems to be because art used to be something that happened to him; weird things kept coming across his path and it was enough for him to tell people about it. I’ll grant that art was a lot weirder a decade ago, but that’s not inherently how it should be, nor can anyone in any coherent way encourage that weirdness to come back. At any rate, what he’s campaigning for isn’t a renewal of art itself. An idealizing nostalgia for a past period can pretend that art once was a utopian absolute, but it never was and can’t ever truly be that perfect. Art only becomes a lasting pleasure as a marathon of prolonged engagement with art in general as a field of inquiry, not in the singularity of a once-and-for-all sublimity. The artist makes their work but they never make a final, perfect masterpiece because the frustrated aspiration for finality always remains in the finished artwork. Somewhat similarly, my most reliable pleasure regarding art is that I’ll always want to read more books about art than I have time for; by the time I finish one I’ve found another two or five. There’s a constant mild frustration in that, and the actual reading matches my initial interest only intermittently. If anything, the pleasure is more in wanting to read than in the reading, but it still yields enough moments of recognition when a writer pins down a specific idea I’ve never put into words or emphasizes a quality in an artwork I didn’t see that it’s ultimately an enjoyment that I’m happy to pursue ad infinitum. These moments of recognition might not be life-changing, but they’re not meant to be. Organizing one’s life around reliably experiencing an enjoyment of art, in reading or otherwise, is what it actually means to have your life changed by art. That might not be a flashy wormhole into a new reality but, unless you’re losing your mind on drugs, that’s not what art is. Art is a field, a subject that explores the mediation of lived experience not to take one out of reality but to be placed more firmly within it. This takes a self-conscious and disciplined reflection on art that borders on the alienated and isn’t particularly romantic. It’s only within this structure of thought around art that it can take on a transformative significance, in the sense of a deepening appreciation for the whole of the Renaissance through a wide range of specific artists, as opposed to a naive, fetishizing attraction to Bruegel or Francesca that’s easy to grasp in the contemporary imagination. This whole thing is called “learning,” and on its own terms it’s not very much fun. Neither is criticism. But the hard work of many people with a real interest in the whole of art is, at root, what’s necessary for the arts to flourish. That’s an inconvenience which is ignored as much as possible by an art world that cares more about money than art, and it’s quite possible to operate an art market with little to no love of art, just as it’s possible to operate without criticism. It’s unlikely to drum up any enthusiasm though, which is why criticism is having a comeback. But how exactly does criticism mediate this engagement?
Stephen Melville’s review of Thierry de Duve’s book on Clement Greenberg is the most compact and penetrating overview of the nature of art criticism I’ve read, at least recently. There’s an impressive dynamic at work in the review, where he actually manages a kind of dialectical synthesis of Greenberg, de Duve on Greenberg, and his own perspective on both. I can’t expect my readers to digest a whole article on JSTOR (link above, if you do take a look I’m mainly concerned here with the second page, but the whole thing is good) so I’ll confine myself to a few excerpts. This passage is a handy illustration of what good art writing is capable of, which conveniently elaborates the value of reading about art that I just brought up; I agree absolutely with Melville against de Duve’s refusal to admit the admixture of art and writing on art. If anything, I’m skeptical of the possibility of a purely autonomous consideration of any artist in the first place. All judgments of art are ideological in the sense that everyone is enacting their understanding of what is and does, and anyone that thinks their understanding is purely subjective is merely ignorant of their received biases. A developed knowledge of art consists less in protecting the uniqueness of your inborn, spurious subjectivity than in throwing it up against a multitude of other perspectives, accepting some views and rejecting others. This is just to say that subjectivity is only a contingently built process of individuation, and precious few people in the arts care to go to the trouble of self-development anymore. This is because ahistorical individualism also champions an infinite “presentness” (or an obfuscating, immaterial fetish for the mythic past in the form of identity absolutism that amounts to the same) that discards real history as dated (or colonialist) and therefore irrelevant. Now, it’s important to maintain an awareness of the present alongside an understanding of history, as it is to avoid romanticizing the past as something above critique, but my point is that neither a truly contemporary and truly progressive vision of art are possible if they’re pursued with our customary cultural amnesia. This is why, in his pursuit of contemporary newness, Dean champions Milady NFTs: if you’ve never understood art as anything more than trends, you’re liable to fall for even the most cynical and morally abhorrent hype machines. More important, however, than my agreement with Melville that “reading is good,” is this, which, in spite of his tedious wording, is a simple definition of what I consider an essential element of criticism, and moreover precisely what’s so lacking in essentially all contemporary criticism. Put simply, the critic understands an artwork through experience, and the reader needs to find some resonance in the critic’s record of their experience if the criticism is to be of any value. Greenberg is an exemplary critic, if not an exemplary theorist, because of his famous “eye” that could react perceptively to an artwork in front of him. This can’t be theorized or justified logically, he just had a sensitivity that remains insightful even when you disagree with him. I’d never seen a Hans Hofmann I liked until I looked up the pieces he singled out as successful, his little Pocket Library of Great Art pamphlet on Matisse has extremely well-chosen plates even if the text is too brief to be insightful, I like Picasso’s The Three Dancers more than he did but his formal observations draw me in to looking closer at the painting, and so on. Compare this to the inevitable explanatory hand-holding in contemporary art writing, the “second press release” that only regurgitates the rhetoric provided by the artist or the gallery, usually imposing some allegorical interpretation that pulls you away from actually engaging with the work, because “judgment” is bad and we’re not allowed to do it anymore. I know, I’ve been railing against this for five years, but here we are. Whatever academic reasoning there once was for a post-judgment approach to criticism, the state of the art world speaks for itself as an argument in favor of the critical. On a practical level I think the aversion, aside from the compound liabilities inherent to saying anything is bad, is mainly motivated by judgment being a messy and difficult business. Even when you want to exercise judgment, it’s nearly impossible to actually judge if you haven’t put a lot of time and effort into developing your own sensitivities in the first place. Thus:
Let’s get this out of the way, I hate Diva Corp. It turns my stomach to see the attention he’s received (it is a he), and if I’m honest with myself his site is probably the main reason Kritic’s Korner has soured on me. I’ve been stewing for a while over it, not particularly because he’s amassed a following that’ll pass mine any day now, but because he sucks, and I haven’t been able to figure out a way to approach his existence without looking salty. Well, since “you’re just jealous” is the evergreen response for artists that are mad at me it’s not even a fear of how I’m received; it’s just awkward to substantiate calling someone a dumbass. If the criticism was any good I’d be pleased to see an imitator of mine blowing up, but the whole thing reeks of the kind of craven thirst for attention that only Angelenos are blind to. I’ll admit he got in a couple of good dunks in here and there early on when he was overtly copying my tone, although the extreme overuse of the one-sentence non-review did a quick job of clarifying that he’s affectating wit more than he has any. As he’s become more intoxicated with the rush of virality he’s eased into the conversational voice of someone too eager to pander to his audience by haphazardly performing his ratings, which I think undercuts what little punchiness he started with. Meanwhile he hasn’t been doing much to develop his perspective on art beyond admonishing galleries for wanting to make money, as if that doesn’t go without saying, another telling sign of naivete. Most importantly, from the start I’ve never been able to discern any coherent sensibility in his judgments or any rhyme or reason to the rating scale. He doesn’t hate the art world enough, he doesn’t even understand it enough to really hate it; he’s assuming the role of the divisive critic for notoriety, not because his spleen needs venting. Yes, yes, that’s subjective. The corollary to what I’ve said above, though, is that subjectivity is not above being judged, even if I can’t definitively prove his incoherence by any rational close reading. To return to Melville, this excerpt from de Duve has one of the better lines on the nature of criticism that I know: “frankness does not equal sincerity.” Diva Corp gets the shtick of frankness, but that’s a far cry from the earnest possession of cogent ideas about art. As de Duve says, you can feel it. It may be totally intangible, but it’s also the cornerstone of being a critic. For that matter it’s also the cornerstone of being an artist; all artists are trying to express themselves, whatever that means, but only artists that have built a way of articulating themselves sincerely and eloquently actually manage to do so. If a critic can’t sincerely recognize an artist’s sincerity there’s no point in being frank. What would there be to be frank about? For one example of Diva’s frank insincerity, a since-deleted “Sunday Morning Editorial” on Dean’s article made a crass joke about Dean’s mother never calling him on the phone and thinking about penises when she was hit by a bus before, as far as I can remember, not actually disagreeing with anything of substance in the piece. I only screenshotted Dean’s response and one of the more embarrassing accompanying memes, but I think the terminal desperation should be clear enough. I don’t think anyone should be using Dean’s mother getting hit by a bus as a lede, Dean included, but it’s especially deranged to try to goad him with it to contrive a bit of controversy. Sure, Diva deleted it, but to not have enough sense to not do it in the first place tells me he’s gotten way too big for his britches. For another, we can turn to his review in Artillery Magazine on Aria Dean’s “Facts Worth Knowing” at Château Shatto. I’ve already established my feelings toward her art in these pages before, so it goes without saying that I see nothing in these vacant sculptures derived from 3D models derived from reconstructions of the set from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance that she took from a mall and a video game. To the extent that the show is “about” anything, the press release and accompanying essay mumble some bong-rip word salad about virtual versus real and the inhumanity of architecture, which, as ever, I fail to connect to the scrap metal in the gallery. It’s just some 3D printed crap trotted out with the cynical badge of an exploration of/commentary on something or other to, you guessed it, make money. Diva doesn’t concur though, as he sees the work as a protest against her status as an institutional darling because she didn’t make it about race. None of Aria’s work that I’ve seen since 2021 has had any overt identitarian or even critical content, so I don’t get where he’s coming from, but I’m actually a little impressed by how dutifully he reads meanings into the work’s vacuity. He automatically sees the emptiness as the presence of something that bothers him about the art world; inasmuch that I’m bothered by vacuous contemporary art I guess we’re on the same page. What’s particularly ironic is that he’s pulled into making the interpretation that the artist is resisting interpretation, arguing for the refusal to adhere to simple allegories of race while creating just another simple allegory of it being against being about race. The implication to me is that, in line with the conventional magazine criticism that he ostensibly wants to be distinguished from, this interpretive labor is a reflexive, pathological avoidance of facing up to contemporary art being an empty hall of mirrors, covering his eyes to avoid taking a long hard look at how worthless it all is. This isn’t theorizing, applying ideas that argue for a cogent ontology of art, it’s looking at the hollow void of art and covering it up with inane fluff. Thus, in spite of an outwardly insurgent format (taken from me wholesale), he’s merely perpetuating the amnesia of art writers that haven’t grounded their understanding of art outside of the immediate present and lack a theory of history.
Speaking of which, Taylor Ervin’s video series Scorned by Muses started out its first episode by accusing me of not having a theory of history, which I thought was weird, especially considering we’re friends and were in a Greenberg reading group a while back, but he also likes to make sweeping assertions that he doesn’t completely understand. As far as I can tell, he means I don’t have his orthodox Marxist/Hegelian Enlightenment theory of historical progress, in which case he’s right. Since Taylor does have some understanding of history, if a shaky one, I’m closer to agreeing with him than I am with Dean Kissick or Diva Corp, and his generally didactic approach is a welcome attempt to actually explain art accessibly to people on Youtube. When he mocks contemporary institutional art, like Norman Teague’s pathetically vague, AI-powered tributes to modernist furniture at MoMA or Cameron Rowland’s deed to a plot of land at Dia that you can’t see, he’s mostly spot-on in taking them to task for their empty sophistry, but the ensuing history lessons end up getting him into trouble. After his response to Rowland he speaks as though the entire history of conceptualism shares Rowland’s weak correlation between the art object and political posturing because he doesn’t know that the original conceptual artists weren’t so ham-fisted; everything that happened between the early minimalism and now seems to be a foggy elision in his mind. It’s even more glaring when he says postmodernism “tries to recover an authentic ethnic or racial identity” against the cold rationality of modernism, which means the reintroduction of classical ornament in postmodern architecture is exactly the same self-mythologizing that the Nazis participated in. He’s drawing from a quote by Habermas, and I don’t know the original context, but Taylor’s use of it is plainly wrong. Venturi and Scott-Brown’s idea of the duck versus the decorated shed isn’t traditionalist, nor is Michael Graves’s Portland Building, or even the Sainsbury Wing at London’s National gallery, to say nothing of postmodern artists. Postmodernism is ironic, cynical, appropriative, even nihilistic; the use of tradition is snarky and playful, not romantic. Only someone who still believes wholeheartedly in the project of modernism could so fully misunderstand art since then, but that’s an easy narrative to fall for if your understanding of art history doesn’t account for the last six decades. This also leads to his naive reception of contemporary artists, which is his real glaring weakness: He calls Anna Rubin’s pigeon video a “new way of seeing the world” because he doesn’t know about Lutz Bacher, he scoffs at his friends for liking Kippenberger and Krebber but thinks Alex Bienstock is an exciting bad boy critique of the Dimes Square scene; he even likes the twee little puppets by ASMA at Sculpture Center, which is distressing. In his video about me he says I’m against coolness, which is a plain misreading of my Manhattan Syndrome article, and I think part of the reason he can’t grasp that I have a theory of history. If I had to define “cool” it would be precisely historicity, inasmuch that “coolness” manages to respond adequately and substantially to the present. Being cool is simply being aware enough of the present to do something that’s both unexpected and resonant, which as far as I know comes close to a micro-scale version of Hegel’s notion of the world-historical. This is different from the 2010s era Dean idealizes when the trend cycle was easy to confuse with substantial novelty, and it’s different from Taylor’s metric that considers anything he sees as “imagining a new world” to be radical. The flaw in his metric, aside from a severe ignorance of contemporary art, is his proscriptive use of theory, which Melville mentions in passing as a risk of “‘theory’ … muddling the distinction between explanation and judgment.” Taylor’s invocations of art as something that should be visionary or beautiful is like him trying to fit a square peg in a round hole; his understanding of theory dictates that art should be these things, but he doesn’t really have any understanding of art or aesthetics beyond the explanation provided to him by the theory. This comes very close to the conventional hard-line Marxist stance, but with a twist. Where the norm would be an interest in art purely in relation to politics that scorns anyone so weak-willed as to consider aesthetics as something more than a bourgeois fallacy, Taylor has incorporated aesthetics into a political conception of art, but he’s still a Marxist that has no sense for aesthetics. Not that I have anything against Marxists, even unfeeling ones, I just don’t like when they condescend to everyone with their self-assurance that their frigidity is inherently enlightened. I even sympathize inasmuch that I’m relatively detached and analytical toward art, but I see that as an intellectual affliction where the type of Marxist I have in mind sees it as a virtue. This brings to mind Tobi Haslett’s clapback against political art’s detractors that goes semi-viral on Twitter a couple of times a year, which always bothers me. I’ve never understood the enthusiasm because it’s composed of two simple fallacies: First, that one would have to live under a regime of state-mandated propaganda to know that propaganda art is by and large trite and insincere, i.e. bad, and second, that the fatigue toward political art is against politics itself, not the clumsy substitution of flat moralizing for artistic content, i.e. a lot of political art is bad and operates on faulty rhetoric. Of course you can have it both ways, but that takes a nuanced comprehension of art as well as politics, and most biennial artists have neither. Tobi’s earnest convictions seem to blind him to the profound insincerity of most contemporary political art; I’ve never heard a “neo-aestheticist” have a bad word for Harun Farocki, for instance, but I don’t see any new Farockis popping up anywhere. The real snobbery is shrugging this problem off as irrelevant and unserious, and he’s entitled to his opinion, I just don’t get why he writes about art if he finds it so contemptible. Taylor isn’t so polarized on this, but he retains the air of condescension, which is why he’s unaware of his own blind spots and thinks I simply must not know about history if I don’t frame art in terms of his dated Enlightenment ideals. This is, I suspect, simply a byproduct of learning your history from a charismatic Marxist professor like Chris Cutrone. I don’t have any particular problem with Cutrone and he seems like a good teacher, but when someone with such a breadth of knowledge and self-confidence gets in front of a crowd of college students it becomes easy to take their word as holy writ, which can prevent young minds from incubating thoughts that develop into fleshed-out perspectives. Like I’ve been saying, it’s hard to get people to learn at all, much less learn to navigate the world without falling into readymade dogmas, and I don’t particularly idealize my own dilettantish autodidacticism, so I’m only trying to issue a corrective. Okay, and stir the pot a little. All the same, I feel like I’m always stuck at the starting line, restating the terms on which art needs to be approached if we’re to make any sense of it to hopefully change its state of affairs. My primary conviction is that the modernism that Taylor champions, the artist envisioning a new reality to uplift humanity, etc., is simply an inadequate idealism that doesn’t actually work. It’s, again, too individualistic, underestimating the role of culture in shaping one’s conception of art in the first place, or predetermining their conception of a new reality. I don’t discount avant-gardism, but it was a historically contingent era that is long gone with idealistic excesses regarding the power of the visionary that are easy to see the limits of now. Likewise, Dean mistakes a brief bubble of optimism from fifteen years ago for an insight into the nature of art, but that isn’t it either. Optimism and excitement, the revolutionary moment, and so on are easy motivations for art when they can be come by, but at present they simply can’t. We’re in a bleak, dour age, and it needs to be critiqued. The substance of that critique needs a relationship to the past, not as a form of nostalgia but as a basis for comprehension and a sense of value. All I’m really advocating for is more sensitivity to art without being clouded by self-centeredness, or a desire for attention, or political prescriptiveness, or anything else. The real problem of the art world is that no one gives a shit about art. The system caters to collectors, and collectors overwhelmingly want to indiscriminately make money or just spend it. In the face of this, those old dirty words like taste and connoisseurship become the only frame in which the value of art can start to make any sense. Of course that’s elitist and all that, but the faux democratization of art only led to a relativity that exorcises art’s content and degrades it further into meaningless acquisitiveness. I’m not idealizing the old aristocratic patronage model, I’m only suggesting that it’s a better state of affairs for people spending money on art to appreciate it. Insofar that art has cultural value it needs to be nurtured and cultivated to be sustained, and that opens the door to taste and elitism, but so be it. It would probably help if there was more intellectual competitiveness in the art world to counterbalance all the careerism. Discriminating taste is a participation in that process of consensus, a grappling with the phenomena of perception to find something of value within it. That is what we need criticism for.
