Dennis Hollingsworth

Fresher Prey

Every so often, a group of artist and writer and artist/writer friends meet at Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. Over a group SMS, debates were raging over Dean Kissick's article in Harper's, The Painted Protest. Over the past couple of months in the chat, articles were dropping in, drip drip. By the time the meet happened at Dallas BBQ, everyone seemed exhausted with the topic. Hashing out the priority between art-for-art's-sake and art-for-politics had not only become tiresome but at least from my perspective, a dead end. Everyone else in the group seemed to share a variation of this sentiment.

Different people were working on drafts destined to be published soon in various publications. One was working on an article about the Guggenheim's Orphism show, questioning if it should be called a movement, whether it was initiated by the artists or assigned by others post facto. Another was writing a piece about how the Metropolitan Museum's recent installations seem over determined or over designed. Another was writing about a piece about how Kinetic Art never got its due.

All three seemed to me to share an over-arching concern about what has be recently called a vibe or vibe-shift. I thought that it was interesting, that this could be a way to move past the loggerhead problem of The Painted Protest debate, to talk about how the art world's conversation phases in and out periodically. I mentioned Becca Rothfeld's post in Substack: "what the heck is a vibeshift?", where she treats the idea of a vibe shift something like the phenomena of semantic satiation, where the constant repetition of a word often leads to an evaporation of meaning, in this case being a conceptual variety of it. Everyone was talking about vibes and vibe shifts and suddenly we find ourselves at a point where we don't know what exactly what we are talking about anymore.

I brought up a bon mot (at least I think so) that I had dropped in chat earlier: "The marquee always changes. This is its nature. The marquee must change." Identity Politics has had a long run now. What's next? Any ideas?

The cat had already had its' sport with the mouse and now it seemed to be dead and lifeless. It probably was. Uninteresting for felines. The group poked at the lifeless body and the conversation moved onwards to fresher prey.

Afterwards, returning home, I played with the carcass of the mouse a little more. My notes:

Some thoughts that might add up:

The proliferating rapidity of art movement generation at different stages of art history is spun up by an enthusiasm, consumption and exhaustion, the rate of which seems the same no matter when they happen, not really affected by accelerating modernity (what happened in the 1910's seems similar to post WWII & Vietnam years*), possessing a constant seemingly imparted by basic human character.

*Does war quicken art movement formation? 🤮

What qualifies the merit of an art movement, actually? Is it enough that a group of artists share inspired concerns and if so, how much deviation between their focus disqualifies the formation of a putative movement? Does such a concordance actually require a resonance echoed by critics and institutions? Is there a minimum degree of resonance? What's the smallest molecule of art history?

In connecting a collection of shared concerns across similar chained episodes in art history, is there a point when the links between dots can become too attenuated? Does the existence of sleeper art movements (arguably Duchamp, for example) disquiet our ability to know anything really substantial or make substantive claims with an air of finality when there might be others sleeping now in plain sight?

Can institutions spike the ball? Can they over manipulate the perception of an art movement? Distortion? When are thumbs on scales?

Is there a dynamic, something like an emergence property going on here?

While Rothfeld's piece was a toss off, her questioning "what is a vibe, actually" becomes something like semantic satiation where when we say a word over and over again, we lose its meaning. Could a similar thing be happening when we question what a vibe or vibe shift is, what an art movement is? A similar thing happens when we ask what art is, doesn't it? It seems that with some ideas or concepts, once you go too deep, it's (seemingly) impossible to surface again.