The subversive luxury item, like the unicorn, was to be found exclusively in carefully-worded written accounts. We kept reading about people who had seen it, but we never met these people. And we certainly never saw the thing with our own eyes. We wondered if the subversive luxury item wasn’t like a unicorn in other ways, too: useful to teenagers, nice to dream about, nonexistent.
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An art form reaches a point of exhaustion when even irony doesn’t save it from torpor. Being forced to rely on intention to guarantee meaning is tiring. Meaning becomes too fragile, and intention slowly becomes ubiquitous, which is to say: worthless.
We saw an exhibition by a young artist who made large, abstract, geometric steel works that borrowed heavily from the styles and techniques of high modernist sculpture. We couldn’t tell if the artist was sincerely invested in exploring that particular language of forms, which had been out of fashion for so long, or if there was an element of critique involved: maybe the young sculptor was mocking the claims to universality that were once attributed to the midcentury art that his work so closely resembled. Or perhaps the works expressed a nostalgic yearning for a time when one could believe in such claims. Or possibly something in-between.
Ultimately we decided that we didn’t care, that we had no interest anymore in trying to figure out the artist’s attitude to his artwork, that we were completely bored with the effort involved in interpreting ambiguous and mute objects, and that we would be bored with the work even if we were to discover that the artist had made the thick, geometric steel sculptures using only his teeth.
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Press and publicity gave the now-standard one-month show a potentially profitable afterlife, and regular exhibits—in Omaha, Rio, and Beijing—gave art magazines conveniently punctual subject matter: A mutually beneficial schedule was arranged.
But eventually the nature of the format distorted, and then nearly eliminated, the content. An exasperated friend explained it to us: “They’re trying to put the history of the soul on the news cycle!”
This regularity of tone and promulgation was undoubtedly useful for both weekend planning and future archives, but let the records also show just how few people actually read the big art glossies. Truth was, we flipped through them. We scanned them for names. We put them down.
Those magazines didn’t give you much art, really. Most of the pictures were a couple of inches big, accompanied by a 250-word summary. It was like looking at someone’s vacation photos. Which made sense, because art was becoming a form of tourism. Everywhere you went, there was a guide, a pamphlet, or a wall text to lead you through the wilderness. Don’t worry, kind visitor: Everything here means something.
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The science of fashion is liking and not liking things at the right times: specifically, liking things a fraction of a second before everyone else likes them, and then not liking them when one is instructed to by the cultural authorities. The technique of re-liking, of finding things that have fallen out of favor and showing how they are in fact worthy of our interest and affection, began as a way to avoid feeling like a sucker. The new things we were recently encouraged to like—tiny phones that play videos, heiresses with television shows, adolescent wizards—have become increasingly torturous to contemplate, much less spend time and money on. So the only alternative was to recycle less torturous things, things we didn’t have to live through the first time, when they too were new and insipid.
The technique of re-liking is not only how we evade the manipulations of the culture industry, it is now a basic part of all our behavior, turning trivial and crucial decisions alike into opportunities for indiscriminate connoisseurship. It is how we dress ourselves, eat, form opinions, write dissertations, and make our art. We have become immune to the lure of the new and attuned to the charms of the old. But are we any less a consumer because we buy used? The logic of revival is still, at heart, the logic of the market. In 2002 we came into our studio and a friend was listening to 13 by the Britpop band Blur. “No one has ever been less interested in Blur than right now,” she said, “It’s a good time to invest in Blur.”
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The academy? We loved the academy! Rigorous intellectual standards, affordable college towns, health insurance for our intelligent friends—what could be bad? No, what troubled us here wasn’t the academy.
The same was true of the market. We loved the market! Everything came from the boom. We worked fewer hours. Some of us had a lot of money, and the rest of us were full of hope.
What really bothered us was the combination of the two. In contemporary art, the academy and the market were perfect for each other: the academy learned about fashion, and the market picked up a smart new lingo. Certificates were granted, connections were transubstantiated into resumés, and academic jargon was reborn as ad copy.
We can’t count the number of times we thought we were talking philosophy, only to find out later we had taken part in a very subtle business meeting.
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We’re struck by the acrobatic, even magical qualities of agency ascribed to contemporary art by its press releases and reviews. We read about works that blur the distinction between high and low or simultaneously enhance and challenge the viewer’s perception of public space, question notions of authenticity or defamiliarize conventional understandings of authorship. Given the seeming inexhaustibility of the actions a work of art can perform it is strange that none are said to safely simulate a critique, inflate the value of a portfolio, exploit a subculture, or complement a decorating scheme.
The press release and the five-paragraph review bookend the textual life cycle of an average exhibition. The former attempts to induce a state of receptiveness in the audience, while guiding its interpretation of the work in a particular and sympathetic direction. The latter reports on the actual experience of viewing the exhibition. If the exhibition were a trial, the press release would be the defense’s opening statement; the review, the prosecution’s closing. In an ideal world they would read differently. It’s no wonder the jury has fallen asleep.
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The artworld was a lousy neighborhood. People left their dogshit all over. The rent was insane, the landlords were indifferent, and the people upstairs just wouldn’t shut up. It was fine to complain and make fun, but some of us had to live there. In fact, most of our friends had to live there.We had come looking for something else, but we couldn’t leave. We had considered moving out, but where to go?
Besides, there were hopeful signs. Just when we wanted to say something totalizing, like “Nobody writes critical reviews!”, we would stumble upon an incisive gem; just when we were ready to swear off the galleries forever, we’d hit a streak of good shows. And when we despaired that there was no way left to communicate, we started to picture you reading this.
Maybe you shared our feelings. We saw you rolling your eyes at the opening, but you were craning your neck to look at the art. You wanted to see something! You seemed like you wanted to say something. Did you want to read something?