January 28, 2025
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.
January 27, 2025
Messaging My Friend A
I had SMS messaged my friend A, these two TikTok links:
Aidan Walker (@aidanetcetera) intro to Historie d'Horreur and the phenomenon of Lakaka:@aidanetcetera The lore de @lakaka , a great innovation in online literary forms. #lakaka #lore #oupigoupi #france #meme ♬ original sound - Aidan Walker
(LINK)
(Sometimes the embeds don't work. Don't know why.)
Historie d'Horreur, @lakaka.land:@lakaka.land histoire d'horreur 😱 #dankmemes #catmemes #chat #brainrot #horreurtiktok #humour #offlain ♬ original sound - lakaka
(LINK)
***
"I don't have that app"
So I took the trouble to send the links to him again via email, taking not a little pleasure in knowing that I'm probably bugging him.
***
A's reply:
Unfortunately, considering how memes function is outside of my interest.
I've been rereading Deleuze's Bergsonism of late, a pleasurably confounding text.
These dorks are trying to wrap their heads around some of the concepts therein.
You will at least appreciate the room in which they sit.Â
***
My reply:
A,Beat for beat reactions:
First thought into the video: so, all is image. Nice summation: "..collapsing matter and memory..." referring I assume to the problem of bridging the perceiver and the noumena.
Genesis 26: Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..."
Wait a sec. Is this Platonism?
Memory as flow. Then, memory was then thought of as a playback, that memory is a neural pathway etched in our brains, . Today, the idea of memory as a reconstruction, that memory is not summoned but instead reconstructed, recreated (and importantly, error prone) in our brains, The flow concept is not displaced, but maybe modifiable?
There's another idea in physics about time cones or timescapes, rendering the past and future more or less fixed.
T=6:00 in
A reliance on calculus. Lines tangent to curves. Slicing derivatives.
There's also a scratching going on in science suggesting that the brain is a transducer of reality past, present and future... not a singular mainframe. A self distributed, not a materialist singularity.
"Science of the day." Keeping up with the evolving debate would a good Bergsonian make. String theory just got dethroned, for example. Dark Matter might be a dead end, for example.
T=11:00
The reduction of the image: that's what a transducer does, a device that converts energy from one form to another.
Maybe, in order to live and navigate in a material world, our access to the totality of which our imaging slices is too much for a mortal capacity. A limited capacity just might be the only way to exist in this world, to live on an earth for any given time. A totality is another word for G-d and isn't it a thing in the bible that direct contact with G-d would destroy mere mortals? Therefore, the need for a GUI avatar like Jesus or a Holy Ghost to sweep a pathway towards the godhead.
"Ego consciousness is hte least conscious facets of our perception."
Nice:
"the image for Bergson is our own body. That is what we experience and what we always there... and it is an interrelationship with the entire universe, this is where Delueze's Plane of Immanence comes in..."T=18:00
Man of action vs man of dreams.
My parents thought I was too day-dreamy and my dad used to say: "Son, you're like a chicken, born in a new world every day." Thanks, dad! 😂
Balance, a good thing.
Extracting advantage, good coinage.
T=23:00
Calculus reference. Shout out to Leibniz.
***The dome? Bucky Fuller was the apex dork. I prefer Gaudi. Good but way-too-thorough presentation by Mark Bury at the Architecture Association. You might have to press your finger on the screen for 2x speed to get to the good parts 3/4 of the way in. Good stuff to get the real nut of parametric design:
Why I thought of you with the Historie d'Horreur and Lakaka:The short bursts of storytelling adding up later in any order, the cats, the noir, the French attitude and his references to Godard...
...made me think of your oeuvre and how it operates in a similar way. Each thing you make could be likened to a TikTok video, viewing one after the other in any order of linkage could suggest a larger narrative with flexible interpretations, each of which are imbued with a certain attitude and character as your work is.
-D
Historie d'Horreur and Goddard:
@aidanetcetera Brainrot, Godard, and online cultural exchange. #lakaka #lore #godard #aboutdesouffle #brainrot #france ♬ original sound - Aidan Walker
Wish I could reveal who A is.
If I asked him, he'd probably say no.
January 25, 2025
Morandi Panel at Zwirner
Curated by Marilena Pasquali - founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center, Bologna - and Mattia De Luca, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 works from across Morandi's career on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the artist's death.
During the first two months of 2025, David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea opened Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation. Similar to the Mattia de Luca show, the Zwirner presentation is closely coordinated with formidable institutions supporting Morandi's legacy across the Atlantic.
The Zwirner show seemed -to my eye- to feature off brand Morandi, what people usually identify as the typical Silence and Light Morandi (an intentional wink to Louis Kahn, same vibes). Anomalies such as (self) portraits, floral still lifestyles, atypical props, etchings, drawings, landscapes, and townscapes. It was effective if it was meant to be instrumental in destabilizing the usual image of the eternal, iconic Morandi scrubbed of detail in softened light, brush touched ever so softly and deftly. That Morandi.
There was a panel discussion. I took notes.
Some key take aways from the panel discussion:January 20, 2025
Responses to Dean Kissick
Let this post be an archive of all the responses to Dean Kissick's article in Harper's Magazine titled "The Painted Protest", subtitled "How politics destroyed contemporary art."
Kissick had kicked open quite a beehive, but I think that the beehive of Identity Politics in art was already in an overripe mature stage, with an ever thinning skin ready to burst. Conversations among my circle of friends have been pinging back and forth, mostly via text, with each new article crackling online and this blogpost has been in formation for at least a month now, swelling my Notes app.
It's fitting yet coincidental that today's date is the Inauguration Day for an extremely contentious presidential election in the USA. November 6, 2024 was a watershed moment and catastrophic for the institutional sphere who depended so dearly on a stable status quo to secure the power structures assembled to date. No doubt, Harper's Magazine intentionally published Kissick's a month after that fateful date but I estimate that not only had Kissick been formulating his thoughts about the topic years earlier, but Identity Politic's latest manifestation as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) within all facets of the superstructure corporate, governmental, educational and of course the arts had imparted... some would say an overconfidence and some would say a fatal level of hubris. This, a fulcrum in a topic full of fulcrums.
There's much to be said about the articles linked below. In my Notes app, each I read each closely, marking up passages, changing the type color red and bolding, italicizing and underlining, adding my own commentary interspersed between paragraphs in blue type. I'll content myself with holding this back not only for the shear tedium it would cost me but probably for you too.
This topic is aging fast not only because it is currently pivoting on what I consider to be an absurd binary of Art-for-Art's-Sake versus Art-for-Politics-Sake but also because a question is yawning about whether there is more to Art than it's current definition. Regarding the former: this is what happens when "live or let die" makes war on "live and let live". Regarding the latter: this is what happens when Fukuyama's "End of History" comes home to roost and the eschatological fever dream tries to force-foreclose on the horizon of utopia, a beat too soon.
I predict that in a year's time, we will all be off to new pastures because, as I like to say:
The marquee will change.
It must change.
That is its nature.
Kissick's subtitle: "How politics destroyed contemporary art." Art can never be destroyed, but it will go underground if it has to.
***
To the links:
PostScript: More articles coming in:
*
Tangential:***
My favorites were Saul Ostrow (He's chasing down the socio-economic aspect) and Ben Davis (encyclopedic, and yet a bit hedgy with too much passive voice but he saves the day in the final paragraphs by flagging Olufemi Taiwo's Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)).
***
TLDR?
Summary via Saul Ostrow's ChatGPT (January 7, '25):
1. Ajay Kurian criticized Kissick's assumptions about identity art and institutional exhibitions, arguing his views align with anti-woke culture wars and fail to address systemic issues in art discourse.
2. Patrick Nathan highlighted the discomfort of partially agreeing with Kissick while finding his critique reactionary and coded against diversity.
3. Saul Ostrow argued Kissick overlooks historical and economic factors shaping art, critiquing his call for a return to romantic ideals.
4 Jonathan T.D. Neil critiqued the article's length and editing, while acknowledging its articulation of a shared sentiment about the art world's political turn but questioning its nostalgic call for Romanticism.
5. Johanna Fateman published Ajay Kurian's detailed critique, which challenged Kissick's stance on identity art and institutional exhibitions, framing it as reactionary and aligned with anti-woke rhetoric.
6. Discussions on platforms like Threads expressed concerns about the article reflecting a broader cultural shift to the right.
7. Christian Viveros-Fauné published a response in The Village Voice to Dean Kissick's article, "The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art." Titled "The Culture of Complaint 2.0: White Guy Wants His Museum Back," Viveros-Fauné critiques Kissick's perspective, suggesting it reflects a nostalgic and dismissive view of contemporary art's political engagement
On Substack
1. Rob Fields critiqued Kissick's call for self-involved art, emphasizing the need for work that fosters empathy and understanding in a divisive era.
2. NewCrits labeled the piece a "clickbait manifesto," challenging its logic and framing Kissick's critique as resentment toward identity-focused art.
On Reddit, notable responses to Dean Kissick's "The Painted Protest" include:
1. LandscapeRocks2: Agreed with Kissick but emphasized the potential for dissent and experimentation in traditional gallery spaces .
2. NationalHunter5407: Critiqued identity-focused art, expressing hope for a new artistic direction beyond current trends .
3. SufficientPath666: Strongly disagreed, highlighting the necessity of addressing transphobia and personal struggles in art .
4. Glass_Purpose584: Praised Kissick for voicing a bold opinion but criticized his perceived dismissal of contributions from artists of color
January 17, 2025
Tell Them I said No
Little by little, then all at once, I've been allowing some lag in posting blog entries here. Circumstances both personal and professional have played a role and despite that this is a kind of public diary... discretion dictates discretion.
I've been maintaining this weblog for now more than twenty years and vast changes have occurred both in my career and in the character of the art world and being chatty about this is the wrong way to go. Thus the tight lips in these "pages".
Lest you read too much into the cryptology of this and the over-arc of my posts... no worries. Things are good.
What is success in art? Making art. A buoyant imagination. The urge to get into the studio, to make things. This and more is happening for me now and into the foreseeable future.
But the art world has become strange and estranging. Hebert documents well the now deep history of artists who by staking all on the heart of what art means, who have removed themselves from the charade that has crept into the various architectures of what has become our art world. The phrase "art for art's sake" has been abused up to this moment and the original meaning nearly lost. This condition has been discussed widely and variously by my circle of artist friends and when I insert the idea that "we are Ronin", they understand and when some might not necessarily agree at some fundamental level, they don't push back. In a world so besotted, some have to guard the flame and keep it safe from the rain for better weather ahead.
Art
The definition of art seems to confound many people, too many are in the art world itself.
Here's my definition in two aspects:
*The spanish expression is ¡Manda cojones!, which translates to "It's fucking awesome!" I've used it time and again both in Spain and in the States, usually resorting to what is probably my own peculiar transliteration, "huevos en mis manos." I've never thought I was misunderstood. When I've deployed the phrase, my meaning is a combination of trepidation and commitment, that I'm operating into unknown territory, that the stakes are high.
***
PostScript:
(I imagine this to be the sticky spot for a never ending list of related subject matter. A magpie's nest.)
- I've found Carter Ratcliff to be a delightful writer. His Substack emailer is welcome in my inbox. Here he is on the definition of art:We ask "What is art?" not to settle the question but to force ourselves up against the impossibility of settling it--an impossibility worth noting, as explicitly as we can, for it is what keeps art open and present and therefore alive.
- Thierry de Duve, THE INVENTION OF NON-ART: A HISTORY:
I DON'T KNOW WHO COINED THE EXPRESSION "NON-ART." But I remember that "non-art" and its supposed twin, "anti-art," were very much in fashion in the art criticism of the 1960s. The terms were used to refer to Dada and early Pop art, then seen as "Neo-Dada." However, by the mid-'70s, critics had realized that Pop art owed very little to the nihilistic thrust of the Dadaists. To imagine Robert Rauschenberg shouting with Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich had become counterintuitive; attention had shifted from Dada to the Neo in Neo-Dada, from the revolution to its recuperation. Consequently, "non-art" and "anti-art" fell out of fashion. It was clear to everyone in the art world that the aggressiveness of anti-art had been tamed, that the negativity of non-art had been in turn negated, sublated, or otherwise mutated into positivity.- The aesthetic judgment "This is art" in Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve by Pioter Shmugliakov & Alma Itzhaky:
Not everyone greeted the erasure of non-art's negativity with indifference or resignation.
Before the rise of the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, the principal question vis-Ã -vis an artwork was the evaluative one: "Is it a good work of art?" or, in a manner in which it was most commonly posed, "Is this piece of art beautiful?" The fact that this is art that is being judged, on the other hand, was trivially given--neither argued for, nor disputed. The classification of certain objects as works of art, if it gave pause for philosophical queries at all, was considered an empirical question, preliminary to the aesthetic appreciation of such works. In the 20th century, however, the cultural situation in the arts became increasingly defined by the fact that the very belonging of certain objects to the category of art turned to be a matter of controversy. Confusion and dismay became the stereotypical responses of art spectators faced with certain objects that claimed to be art, and were treated as art by certain people and institutions, but which by the traditional standards shared by most of the population appeared as no more than a hoax or a provocation (viz. Malevich's Black Square [1915], Duchamp's Fountain [1917/1963], Manzoni's Artist's Shit [1961]). Since the 1960s, clarifying the status of these objects also became a central issue for philosophical aesthetics.
- X