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Art Forum

In “The Painted Protest” [Essay, December], Dean Kissick puts apt words to a frustration I’ve had with contemporary art for the better part of a decade. In my own work as an art critic, I’ve attempted to make the same argument more or less explicitly over the years. Kissick’s article, I think, marks a definitive end to an era that started to come undone at the last Documenta, in 2022.

I write this shortly after Nan Goldin took to the stage during her opening at the Neue Nationalgalerie to critique Germany’s unconditional support for Israel, which led to calls in Die Welt for the resignation of the museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, for allowing her to speak. The fiercely right-wing paper describes Biesenbach’s overall programming, with its relentless political signposting and simplistic readings of artworks, in terms I actually agree with, much as I abhor its positions on everything else. The international, generally left-leaning cultural establishment that Biesenbach represents has made itself vulnerable to legitimate criticism by subordinating art to a brand of political progressivism that Kissick characterizes as toothlessly mainstream, drearily moralistic, and fatally out of touch—terms that should not, however, be used to describe an artist like Goldin.

But since the pendulum seems about to swing the other way, the question is where it will land. I entered the art scene some ten years after Kissick and don’t share his nostalgia for the post-net days of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s unabashed fetishism of youth and connectivity, in my view an unsustainable means of attaining novelty. (Younger millennials like myself caught a chill from Gen X’s media experiments, responding with equally unflattering forms of self-diagnosis.) But we have to find a way for art to matter without regressing to pious needlework and “queering” Picasso. The sincerity toward the end of Kissick’s essay feels risky, and in that way vital—I think we can agree on that as a place to start.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen
Berlin

 

Kissick identifies a nostalgic impulse at the heart of contemporary art post-2016: “Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present.” His essay is itself laced with an overwhelming nostalgia—not for modernist painting or indigenous folk art, but for the feelings of urgency and relevance associated with the international art scene of the early Aughts. And while Kissick is right to be exasperated by the often banal connections drawn between contemporary artworks and their self-proclaimed traditions, his own analyses of contemporary art depend heavily on references to works from his own—pointedly Italian—canon (Fellini, Paolo Sorrentino, Giovanni da Modena). The tradition he seems to prefer, if I may indulge in a bit of reductionism, is more Dionysian than Apollonian, more Romanticist than classicist. Kissick seems to succumb to the same tendencies that he observes in those he critiques: biographical scene-setting, nostalgia, and an overreliance on retrospection. Does he have a way out?

Central to Kissick’s essay is the thinking of Arthur Danto, who gave a compelling history of modern art’s accelerating paradigm shifts and eventual implosion in the Sixties—sometime a little after Pollock. Perhaps Kissick ought to consider that the tradition (which probably began with Pop Art) wherein the role of the artist is to “consume the world” has simply reached its end point. The pluralized acquiescence to commercial reality that began with Warhol may have peaked in the Aughts, with “a globalized circuit of biennials and fairs that ran on the international trade of ideas and commodities”; Obrist might be its Pollock. Instead of the death of painting, this time it is curation that has been exhausted, and we are now in something like the strange transitional phase of the early Sixties.

Alternatively, we could shed Danto’s framework and see that the modernist pendulum is still swinging. This would require us to make room for retrospection (new culture has always been made of old culture), as well as to acknowledge that most art at any given moment is mediocre; that the art scene is not synonymous with art; and that great art can also be political, realist, and traditionalist. Perhaps the present moment seems “unreal” only from the vantage of 2015, where Kissick seems to be stuck, and the impulse to reground ourselves in tradition will, even if it has yet to do so, produce better art than a return to the spectacle of a time when the internet was fresh and the cash was flowing.

Emmet Elliott
Porto, Portugal

 

As a former employee of the art world, I read Kissick’s essay with great interest. I do wish the piece spent a bit more time with Danto’s philosophy and its implications—how the end of mimesis did not mean the end of the art object, but instead a shift in its constitution toward a circular logic. Per the definition proffered by the likes of Danto and George Dickie, art after Warhol simply became whatever people in the art world said was art. Curry, sonnets, handicrafts, philosophizing, YouTube videos—artists were, as Kissick writes, able to do whatever they liked and exhibit it.

By the 2010s, this had grown fairly tedious. An inevitability, perhaps, of the rise of the creative class and the embourgeoisement of the artist’s life as fine-arts programs became a potent source of revenue. (There must be more people with art degrees now than at any other point in human history, to say nothing of the number of artists.) What Kissick recalls so fondly as an “orgy” of invention others likely remember as a childish frenzy of indexing, the B.F.A. equivalent of licking something to say it’s mine. These artists often knew very little about what they were doing, a condition that both encompasses and exceeds the inept political gestures that Kissick laments.

Matthew Shen Goodman
Brooklyn, N.Y.

 

Sorry, I could barely get through Kissick’s orgy of grievances. I lived through the years he elegizes, saw some great art and even more middling art. Anyone reading his piece with a gimlet eye will notice that it was speculation, not “politics,” that sucked the air out of the room. I do agree with him on one point: the art world is boring right now. But you’re not going to save it by being boring yourself. And you’re definitely not going to get art that “tears open [your] consciousness” through nostalgia for Hans Ulrich Obrist. Go outside, look around. Stop being sad because markets and institutions aren’t pandering to you. Go where the energy is. Go make some real friends. Break a magazine. Go to a protest. Free Palestine.

David Velasco
New York City

 

The position Kissick adopts—that “a new answer to the question of what art should do” is to “amplify the voices of the historically marginalized,” while “what it shouldn’t do … is be inventive or interesting”—not only presents a false binary, but also neglects to engage with contemporary art history. What Kissick identifies as a new trend has always existed, and he should have attempted to grapple with any of the most widely appreciated and recognizable American artists from the past half century—Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example—whose work is both rooted in identity and immensely valuable on aesthetic grounds alone.

Alana Pockros
Brooklyn, N.Y.

 

Dean Kissick responds:

So long as we agree that most contemporary art is boring and mediocre, that’s a good place to start. Emmet Elliott, writing of my own retrospection, asks, “Does he have a way out?” How about this: In order to move beyond nostalgia, let’s make and show art that explores how it feels to be alive right now. Let’s engage, for instance, with the mass culture of the internet and its effects. While the art world has embraced traditional folk art that was once excluded, there remains much to be explored within new folk art—that of the digital commons. Let’s exhibit art made with software and machines.

To move beyond the biographical, we could develop modes of art making that complicate artistic subjectivity, as in Pierre Huyghe’s mental-image works, which he creates by using a functional MRI machine to scan volunteers’ brains and then deploying neural networks to interpret their activity. We could experiment with anonymity, as many have online, or with the group pseudonymity of an internet cult like that of the Remilia Collective. We could turn ourselves into material for others to perform, as Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have done with Holly+, a singing bot trained on Herndon’s voice. Let’s create more complex models of identity to reflect our integration with media, avatars, and data in the twenty-first century.

The ways in which we experience and make sense of reality, express ourselves, and conceptualize our selfhood have been radically transformed over the past decade, and make for rich subject matter. Contemporary art needn’t make use of recent technologies, but it should at least explore how these technologies have changed us—and perhaps even push those changes further.

 

Glass Half Empty

In his excellent Easy Chair column [“The First Punch,” December], Matthew Karp writes, “For nearly a century, the American republic had persisted half-slave and half-free.” But New Jersey did not “abolish” slavery until 1804, by a legislative act that began a slow and gradual process of limited emancipation (the children of enslaved mothers, for instance, were required to enter long-term “apprenticeships” that lasted into early adulthood). As a result, many enslaved persons remained in bondage until the state ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1866. Perhaps what needs to be abolished is the notion that, before the Civil War, the North was a unified bulwark of freedom-loving liberationists.

Rusty Smith
Trenton, N.J.


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