The Painted Straw Man

New Trends, Old Markets

There’s a unique, uncanny revulsion in reading something you agree with but nonetheless find disturbing, like a glimpse in the wrong mirror. Last month, Harper’s published Dean Kissick’s “The Painted Protest,” an essay about the function identity has assumed in the contemporary art world. Typically, it went viral — at least as far as essays about art can go viral — and it seems to have done so for the usual, callow reasons. Some found it “spot on” and felt as though Kissick was saying things that “people” were “afraid to say.” Others thought it was offensive, reactionary, and the garden variety of “–ist”s that might as well be buttons of their own next to the hearts on every platform. The essay’s arrival, mere weeks after the horrifying results of the US election, is perhaps what made it feel timely in the way what goes viral is timely: Here was one more “voice” seeming to blame diversity, if in a hushed and coded way, for those election results.

In one register, Kissick is absolutely right — a judgment that extends to publishing as well, which, as I’ve said before, tosses authors and their identities at social media users like slop into a pen of pigs, and with just as much respect for both. However, Kissick doesn’t seem aware of how his own judgment capitulates to the logic of such a cynical, simplistic market.

In writing about art he finds flat, Kissick reliably quotes exhibit catalogues, artist statements, and program copy. “The text asked”; “as the catalogue puts it”; “the accompanying wall text explained” — all of these mediations cede Kissick’s critical judgment to the dynamics of what is essentially a form of advertising. He isn’t critiquing art, just the way it’s marketed. Quoting these statements as examples of how ridiculous the art world has become is to overlook the obvious: that wall text and catalogue copy is and has always been some of the worst writing on earth, no matter how great the art.¹ This rhetoric isn’t Kissick’s default gesture, as he makes clear in describing work he actually likes: Massimo Bartolini’s Italian Pavilion, for example, is “a marvelous experience and an unusual one, unlike any other I have had in the thousands of exhibitions I’ve visited in my life. It felt like a reverie, or a Paolo Sorrentino scene about the ecstasy and sadness of life.” This differentiation is a sleight of hand that undermines Kissick’s authority, even if his judgment is, as I’ve said, at least approaching a crucial and intractable problem in the arts, and in culture generally.

Ultimately, Kissick’s stance is a nostalgic one, which is never much of a stance: “Only ten years ago, the art world was… a globalized circuit of biennials and fairs that ran on the international trade of ideas and commodities. Art was where experimentation happened, where people worked out what it felt like to be alive in this strange new century.” But, he adds, as the “liberal order began to fall apart around 2016… the ambition to explore every facet of the present was quickly replaced by a devout commitment to questions of equity and accountability.” But what had prioritized, exactly, such relentless novelty? What had created a demand for work that pursued this novelty to often cartoonish, incoherent extremes? One only has to underline Kissick’s own word — replaced — to understand that what was once a market of “the new” is now a market of identity (or social justice, or politics, or whatever you want to call it). Despite this replacement, the market itself hasn’t changed; it’s just that the tulips, say, which Kissick grew up with are no longer what fetch the highest prices, nor the attention that chases so many zeroes.

The market, in other words, hasn’t altered its form, only its content. Where once novelty maximized media circulation (and therefore revenue), now social justice fulfills the same function — a new picture in an old frame. Both are facile images that hope to go viral; both try to justify art’s social utility in order to attract more funds. Identity has simply replaced novelty as what solicits attention, grants, and donations — as well as what guides the creation of new work. None of this would be possible without the art world’s colonization by neoliberal values, that “trade of ideas and commodities” Kissick mentions. This is made clearer in his lamentation of “today’s culture of spin-offs, remakes, quotations” — an art world that “is not so different from movie studios, fashion houses, or record labels.” As an antidote, he calls for a “return” to the surreal.

While Kissick uses surrealism to mean dreamscapes — the “absolutely deranged” visions of outsider artists, as well as the forms given to our “irrational, incoherent” inner lives — this longing for surrealism feels at odds in an essay that criticizes the dynamics of the contemporary art world. In a market with “little interest in novelty” (again, identity is the novelty du jour), “new culture is made from nothing but old culture.” But this recycling is, at heart, a surrealist enterprise — the collaging of isolated, unrelated phenomena whose juxtaposition generates an energy signature that thrives on sheer strangeness, on the unfamiliar (also known as novelty). What’s more, to base utility (or marketability) on identity treats the self as a discrete, exchangeable object — a surrealist ethos that finds its practical and globalized home in neoliberalism, which is, in its radical flattening of all phenomena into currency, a surrealist application of politics. The art market as it exists today and the art market as it existed in Kissick’s youth are both surrealist markets. It is because of surrealism’s lasting effect on not only this market but on the entire world, the world as most of us experience it, that identity can be a baseline selling point for one of the most complex activities human beings participate in.

Frankly, I think we’ve all had enough of surrealism.

Perhaps most fascinating, however, is Kissick’s demarcation of 2016 — when the “liberal order” lost its credibility. He isn’t wrong, but there’s something missing here. Obviously one reads in this year the first election of Donald Trump and the institutional shocks that came with it, as well as its parallels all over the world — Hungary, India, Brazil, and so on. Before 2016, Kissick implies, art was heterogenous. It pursued forms in all directions; it experimented; it “had the freedom of absolute purposelessness.” But after 2016, art grew homogenous and formally conservative. The self, in the guise of the artist’s identity, had come to eclipse the art: “If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant.” This perception is Kissick at his best, and the essay’s argument at its strongest. But ultimately it ignores the why behind this shift.

Yes, Trump was a deviation in the liberal order, but more significantly, Trump was a deviation in the media order. By interacting with citizens primarily on Twitter (and often refusing press conferences or interviews), Trump invited the media itself — the reporters, executives, anchors, writers, moguls, analysts, fundraisers, pundits, and so on who actually comprise the media — to participate in his presidency online rather than off. What this means is that, ever since 2016, the media — and all the influence that comes with it — has been more reliant than not upon the internet, as well as likelier than not to arrive at an instant consensus because of it.² This is the consequence of connectivity (as opposed to sensitivity). What’s more, Trump’s Twitter deployment of bullying, exclusion, humiliation, and simplistic messaging (primed for virality) meant that the internet, more than ever before, imposed itself on real life. In fact, 2016 is when the internet became real life; the internet could now influence, affect, and alter life in the physical world like never before, and what happened in a tweet was likely to be more important, and more influential, than what happened in the White House itself.³

Because the art world is little more than an enclave of the media, this “internet world” we’ve lived in ever since Trump’s first presidency means that the art world, too, is more online than off, and cultivates itself, distorts itself, for an online sensibility. Kissick mentions a precursor of this in his mentor Hans Ulrich Obrist, who “almost destroyed himself” in his zeal for 24/7 networking, “as a committed early-twenty-first-century citizen should, in an orgy of connectivity.” Obrist believed in the internet’s promise: Art, in this globalized world, could be a “new universal language.” Alas, it seems as if Obrist has received his wish in the art world Kissick derides — one in which social media values, which elevate the cultivation of the self and its marketability above all, seem to shape what art gets made, what sells, what garners attention, and what gets ignored. This is how novelty (which is a kind of empty pluralism) has been replaced by identitarianism (which, ironically, turns diversity into homogeneity). And if all art is more or less formally the same, one certainly doesn’t need critics to interpret it; the audience arrives at the museum or the gallery with everything they need to know, which they’ve learned by using social media.

None of this means, contra Kissick, that identity is the issue. Nor at issue are the artists seeking to celebrate and explore their identities — which, again, the art world has historically neglected and excluded, and which are now claiming an authority they’ve heretofore been unable to claim. The issue here is the cynicism that enables buyers, curators, committees, and publishers — the same people who believed, ten years ago, that whatever was new was the work to celebrate — to now believe that identities are the latest toys or trophies. Again, this is just the newest picture in an old frame — and what deserves criticism is the frame. What’s at stake in these arguments is the art market that’s existed all along (or at least since surrealism), which can only exist in a world — and here I mean the real world, the whole world, the big world — that values money and connectivity to such an extent that anything, even a human being, can be reduced to an object and circulated as a stock or a currency. Trumpism didn’t create this art world; this art world and its larger context created Trumpism. This is the trend to protest, and the frame to discard; meanwhile, the people who’ve shaped it and who profit from it are those who’ve earned all the criticism, if not outright scorn, any thinking person can spare.

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1. If you’ve ever been to a small gallery desperate for Instagram posts, you know that the last person anyone should trust to write about a painting is the person who painted it.

2. It’s hard not to think of Jacques Rancière’s use of “consensus” here — not as the objective of politics, but the foreclosure of politics. In consensus, there is no assertion of grievance against the dominant will.

3. This is, incidentally, all part of what I call the bureaucratic style — neoliberalism’s imposition of values, forms, and behaviors on all walks of life, homogenizing and flattening the complexity of the human experience, all while neutralizing the general will by disempowering and disenfranchising all who uncritically participate in these values, forms, and behaviors. Through the bureaucratic style (a “no-one’s style”), corporations and the governments who defend them seek to deplete populations across the world of their agency.