by Alex Wells
Dean Kissick wrote an article for Harper’s (remember Harper’s?) that’s been much-discussed and passed around about how the art world’s politics have gotten ahead of it, full of bon mots like “Curators keep fighting a culture war that has already ended in the world outside.”
Everyone nods or “Yes, buts…” it and their comments—accurate or otherwise, seem motivated less by a desire to enlighten than jealousy that Kissick’s exact version of the take is prestigiously in print and theirs is not.
I say “version” because this happens every year or two: someone writes an essay announcing the emperor has no clothes and that due to critical trends or market forces, the art world has elevated lackluster or fraudulent artists to a place of undue prominence. When this occurs, everyone adjacent to the art world passes the article to you with a nonplussed “Is this…true?” and everyone in the art world, more- or less-, agrees it kind of is.
If everyone agrees why does it keep happening?
The problem occurs at step two. Step one is an author declares “Everything today is shit”. Step two is the author—and everyone else—saying “…unlike ______” and it is when that blank is filled—is when all hell breaks loose. Because at that point everyone stops agreeing. Kissick’s baffling take is “Everything in the contemporary art world is shit —unlike ten years ago” but you ask around you’ll hear “…unlike 20 years ago”, “…unlike 70 years ago”, “…unlike 150 years ago”, “…unlike in the world of street art”, “…unlike in China”, “…unlike these four specific artists I like and nobody else does”.
This is the real problem. Sturgeon’s Law demands that ninety percent of everything is crap and simple business math requires every gallery give a solo show to one artist a month aside from a group show all summer. The math demands bad art—but no-one has ever really agreed what the good art is.
Yesterday a friend and I laughed our way through a typical big box museum hagiography of a very blue-chip and very dead artist, agreeing heartily that they had achieved little other in their long career than a particularly complex self-deception, aided and abetted by the art world’s desperate need to believe in something. After lunch, I said I wanted to stop in to a Hollywood gallery to have a second look at an interesting show. He agreed to come along and—while I had a wonderful time—it could not be clearer that he thought, well, that the artist had achieved little other than a particularly complex self-deception, aided and abetted by the art world’s desperate need to believe in something.
Here is the thing: Commercial and critical chicanery can determine in what way most of the art we see sucks, but we will all always think it mostly sucks. Because the real problem is us: we do not like the same things, we do not have the same back-brains and sensitivities, we do not share the same traumas, hopes, fears, and attractions. Larger dynamics may determine which barrel’s bottom is being scraped in any given year, but the bigger problem is we have always all drunk from different barrels.
Image: Yaou Tcing Hoernld