September 26, 2025
WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY?
At the end of last July, shortly before I departed NYC for Spain, there was a book release event at Artists Space in TriBeCa. The publication, "WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY? And what should it be for, if anything?" is a coda to a series of conversations dubbed "The Seaport Talks" hosted by the Perić Collection and edited by Dean Kissick. With the pre-departure preparation in full swing, I had just enough time to run down and pick up a copy of the book.
Dean Kissick stirred up a hornet's nest of a debate amongst at least one circle of my friends in NYC with the publication of his article in Harper's December 2024 issue, The Painted Protest. Best to read the whole thing if you haven't already but perhaps one snip might capture the gist: "...the art world had grown frivolous and decadent, that the proliferation of forms and approaches over the decades had reached its limit." Actually, this sentence is followed by touching a third rail, fingering social justice discourses as one of the prime culprits. So, an uproar ensued as friends shared links to response articles some of which you can read here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
As the spring sprung in 2025, I sensed that my pals were weary of the topic, the chatter petered out. My perspective: this whole discussion was late in coming and it was a shame that it had arrived in the wake of the Trump election last November. Social Justice is uniquely armored against critique but it is a fact that art criticism had been dying for decades, long before Social Justice fully entered the stage. Critics are the honey bees of the art world and the collapse of the pollinating function that refines thought and defines breaking art history was a disaster that few could stomach to face. We all whistled past the graveyard of the current art cultural system.
People inexhaustibly nominate a multitude of art movements but in the big picture, there are only two: Modernism and Postmodernism. All too many think that the latter succeeded the other but I think differently. Both were born at the same moment like the particle / antiparticles we think of in physics. I am asserting here that the widespread assumption that art succeeds itself episodically has led us into a mental cul-de-sac, paralyzing our imagination. The inability to appreciate or simply understand that each implicates the other, the Modern and Postmodern, has led our art world of today into a strange and strongly insistent impotence. Similar to the material reality of painting where paint itself relies on both binder and solvent, Modernity can't be properly appreciated or understood until we appreciate how the binder of Modernism critically needs the solvent of Postmodernism and visa versa. We won't be mentally released from the 20th century in order to live into the 21st until we grasp this interrelationship. Until then, we will be mired in confusion and lassitude.
After the collapse of the Classical canon, the Modernists sought to redraft a canon appropriate to the new age that could be classified anew, whereas Postmodernists despised canon altogether. "We don't need your stinking badges." The seminal figure for the latter group was Marcel Duchamp (in my argument for twin birth, artists like Alfred Jarry had prefigured Duchamp) and his prime influence was the assertion that art is idea. As New York driven Abstract Expressionism started to wane in power and influence, what would become Postmodernism flowered, fueled by the anarchic vapors that inspired Duchamp, all too ready to kill what many considered the father. Here's my nut for encapsulating the bigger picture:
While Modernists wanted to touch God via material means, the Postmodernists instead wanted to point to (not touch) everyday life (not God) via conceptual (not material) means.
Art-as-idea was the core and Sol LeWitt was the fruit of the Postmodern tree. He concretized a most etherial assertion into art-as-a-set-of-instructions, anticipating the Information Age by ten or twenty years. After quintessence, nothing of similar consequence could be plucked, so anything else conceptual or vaguely so was food for the fodder. Hence, the widely shared sense -slowly at first, then all at once- of diminishing vitality in the art world since the end of the 70's.
Starting in cloud misted mountaintops as dew dripping from tree branches, splashing cold into creeks, joining together into a river soon mighty and then mightier. What was once clear, slowly becoming cloudy and then brown and then more brown, widening with gathering force. until the delta spread driving towards some supposed ocean over the horizon. Tributaries fan out and the water is now slow, fetid, steaming, stinking. (Don't get me wrong, the ecology of marshlands are a wonder all in themselves.) This is where we are, where we've been for quite some time, deep in a delta phase. What this all adds up to is that even though we are 25 years into a 21st century, we are still caught up in the brambles of the 20th. We have yet to fully evaporate into cloud formations that could define the epoch we have been living into all this time. The 20th century art world -episodic- model just doesn't work anymore for us nowadays. Reconciling ourselves to this reality is the struggle we are in today. It's a shame that the supposed successor to the modern is uniquely configured to resist reality.
After the impact of Kissick's article apparently had died out, sprung a multitude of other writers from a whole spectrum, excellent to mediocre, essentially complaining about the fact that what we are seeing in the galleries and in the institutions is weak cheese. I wish that I had the presence of mind to compile an inventory of them as they were published, but trust me, after Kissick's salvo faded away, similar assertions reverberated in the commentariat, outside of the perilous framing of a critique of Social Justice. Red lights blinked on dashboards everywhere.
I haven't read deeply into Kissick's oeuvre but my sense is that he isn't a good writer -- or perhaps more to the mark, he isn't a clear thinker. In his "Painted Protest", he starts off with "My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery." and takes five paragraphs until one could get an inkling of his thesis. (Guess I should have written that in first person, oh well.) Later on in the article, he establishes his experience glorying in the globe trotting art world as the standard to measure the current contemporary art by. This, is problematic. These two examples and more only clouded what I think is his central point, one made by subsequent writers struggling to memory hole "Painted Protest" by critiquing en passant: We're in trouble, folks. We're mired in mediocrity and can't get out.
To Kissick's credit, he sort of sticks his critique in the first sentence of his introduction to his slim Perić publication: "...many things [...] are wrong with art criticism today." Four paragraphs later, he returns to his point:
The reason we want to encourage criticism now is because we feel that contemporary art is ailing, and that it is very important to talk about this. Major exhibitions are generally met with total indifference, art seems as stuck as the other 20th century forms -- movies, pop music, television, contemporary art -- and trouble keeps coming.The problem with his title "WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY? And what should it be for, if anything?" is that its' jalopy-like character enabled several of the contributing writers to avoid his central concern. Some dwelt on the nature of contemporary art, some on its' function, only a handful hit the bullseye. Maybe the book was assembled for enough time after the series of discussions to allow the meander, maybe the discussions themselves were hard to focus (most probably), maybe people didn't want to deal with what I'm asserting here as the central issue (no doubt).
Be this as it may, the roster of respondents -to what I figure was a request for contributions via email- is an interesting cross section into the thinking of as least one segment of the New York intellectual art world. I'm providing a short summary of each one, clearly my own assessment of what their essays are trying to say. Click on their name, and you'll find my annotations and commentary in each so you can verify if my summaries are correct or not.
What is this picture painting?
Splash Page
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction 1
Introduction 2
Introduction 3
Introduction 4
***
Domenick Ammirati: Today, art is just money. We are ending in a whimper.
Alvaro Barrington: Contemporary art is fast. Painting just has to catch up.
Gavin Brown: Contemporary art is a rat race in a dead end. His prescription is to return to comms of personal subjectivity and connections.
Caroline Busta: The future is networked nodes.
Joshua Citarella: We're fucked. Something something, poetry, something something. (In the key of trend analytics.)
Ben Davis: The conversation about art is better these days than probably the art itself.
Aria Dean: Contemporary art is an exhausted category. Art is radically free.
Travis Diehl: Art is all kinds of doing. Good art makes me feel ambivalent and uncertain.
Bridget Donahue: [Rambling, incoherent.]
Jason Farago: We have learned to live without great things.
Bettina Funcke: Art is something not to be consumed. Rather, it consumes you.
Nick Irvin: Contemporary art is bullshit. Get out while you can.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: Art is a stone to be chiseled, revealing truth. Technology has rendered us into lab rats. The lab rats must reveal the truth.
Matthew Linde: Art/Fashion changes not vertically but horizontally from some kind of "outside".
Patrick McGraw: The world that places a screaming Wojak and a Tintoretto at the same level, short circuits art. The problem many sense is in a crescendo and art will prevail. I don't know how, but it will.
Hiji Nam: Art is a joke. Art should emulate jokes more. Humor will survive, so will art.
Seth Price: The question of what contemporary art is, is irrelevant. The luxury of its' spread is important.
Walter Robinson: Art is the assertion of subjectivity in the face of oblivion, it also has five functions.
Jerry Saltz: No one knows the purpose of art and it doesn't matter. Art goes on.
Roberta Smith: Art is the efficient conveyor of subjectivity.
Tobias Spichtig: The contemporary doesn't exist, it has been disabled by the NOW. [?] Art is spiritual and supersedes mortal grasping.
Natasha Stagg: The lassitude of the moment is an illusion. Imagination is the cure.
Sean Tatol: Art sold itself out. The datum of imagination that art promises is all around us, if only we could attune to it.
Andrew Norman Wilson: There's a way out of this current lassitude. You just have to find it, others have in related mediums.
Lloyd Wise: Yes, the present times are scary, but find a way to be thrilled by it in order to reanimate art.
If you know, then you'll know.
It is not his property.
It is not your property.
It issues not from him. It isn't his.
The artist uses media and the artist is a medium.
This is why we use a medium.
This too, is refraction.
Inspiration is the breathing of spirit.
The displacement is the power.
The grasp of power destroys all.
