THE END OF ART HISTORY?
By Nolan Kelly / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024
This trend continues downward, skipping Greenwich Village (which retains its old roots as a mecca for chic restaurants and SATC tours), into SoHo - where the vibe is mostly knockoff Basquiats, minor Koons, and works by unknown artisans in the school of Banksy - until we reach Tribeca, where originality revives itself in such a dense profusion of small, undernourished converted office spaces (mostly on the upper floors of Walker Street) that to zip in and out between them makes one feel like a bee, pollinating the city with paint.
The bad news is, we are in a period of philosophical poverty on the matter of aesthetics, with scarcely an inkling of what it is we are looking at, where it came from, what it means, and how we might apply it to our sense of the world at large. Appreciating art today is a matter of captivated consumption; we feed on it with the same distracted energy with which we scroll through memes or search for restaurants.
And while there are more than enough sensual trifles around for everyone to stuff themselves silly, moments of reflection and digestion are curiously lacking. What is the makeup of our ekphrastic diet? Is it good moral fiber or loaded with lard? The work on view today is so stylistically and formally diverse that trying to put it under a single rubric of aesthetic criteria would torture our standards and inevitably put quite a broad swath of exciting art out of our purview.
I've been seeing and writing about gallery shows in New York City for the past six years. While I get a lot of satisfaction in responding to something directly, simply trying to describe what I'm seeing and what it does well, the lack of any overriding theory or philosophy upon which all of this might build has always nagged me, and occasionally led to real fears that we are have reached an age of bona fide aesthetic decline. What has always boggled my mind is how different the art of today appears from any that came before it in terms of stylistic diversity, robust representation, richness of personal perspective - and total lack of overriding dogma, trend, discourse, or value. I'm thinking of Abstract Expressionism after Pollock, Pop after Warhol, or Pictures after Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman - artists who were also organizing principles, altering the permissible conditions of those who worked around them.
True, art history has always deluded itself that the breakthroughs of a single person emerge ex nihilo and have an immediate, global effect. Such oversimplified storytelling is incomplete and neglectful, reinscribing racial, sexual, and geographic hierarchies into a dangerously false sense of individual genius. But the backdrop of this kind of linear narrative was helpful, at least until recently, as a way of understanding what one sees as the product of a historically developed system that had a center and periphery, a top and a bottom - reversals of which were frequent, often welcome, and always thrilling.
Today, these narratives no longer apply to the art of the present, and it's an open question whether they are still a worthwhile way to talk about the past. In the absence of teleology, we have bacchanalia. It's a free-for-all, and no one is winning.
The culprit for this is obviously the internet. For a while, one needed some sort of specialized education (or at least enough leisure time to frequent the museum) to know where to begin. Today, all of art history exists side by side and simultaneous, in the crackling ether. Dürer's on Tumblr and Da Vinci's on Pinterest. For those without the time or interest in cultivating technical skill, the culture of Duchamp is alive and well, ready to take just about any piece of junk (alleyway refuse is particularly common today) and declare it art.
How successful these maneuvers go is all a matter of self-mythologizing confidence, networking, and nepotism. Whether anyone makes a profit after the rent is paid is an open question. This, perhaps, is the one great continuity between present and past: artists always have and will continue to do what they must to scrape by. The only difference now is that the rulebooks have all been thrown out. The possibilities and pitfalls alike are head-spinning.
This current state of affairs is nonetheless probably far better for everyone involved than the haughty, exclusionary world of the Paris salons or the bitter infighting of the AbEx crowd as they jostled for Clement Greenberg's affection. But since I'm a critic, which essentially means a self-appointed moralizer, I'm left concerned by the unstructured hedonism of the whole situation. It's not that I can't be happy with everyone's happiness. I just yearn for a point of view I can trust.
The idea of beauty, for one thing, nags me. Does it exist anymore? The art I see everywhere today is often interesting and rarely beautiful. There's a lingering sense that to make something too pretty would destroy its interestingness and render it flat and commercial. What's pursued instead of beauty is far from clear. The artists whose work I follow are rarely, if ever, striving to achieve some signature style as Picasso and Matisse achieved in their lifetimes, nor does any kind of formal breakthrough (in painting, at least) seem possible anymore. Instead, artists today reference and remix, applying a familiar style to an odd subject or vice versa, and striving whenever possible for a sense of pure unexpectedness, a chameleonic ingenuity that requires a fair amount of detective work (and critical generosity), to graft a narrative of artistic development onto.
Following them down the rabbit hole of interests and subjects has itself become much of the actual work of art criticism lately. If you can sum up an artist's whole career in response to their latest show, your word deserves to get printed in the paper. All of which encourages today's young artists to engage in even more heterodoxy, creativity as a series of leftward feints, until anything definitive that can be said about them comes out blandly unhelpful, idiotically banal. Alongside much theoretical "restorative justice"-style criticism that seeks to outmaneuver absolutely every other perspective to arrive at a position of pure negation, this is the rhythm of much art writing today.
Though the idea of beauty is elusive, imperialist, and morally dubious, it's important because it defines for us a set of values about what our culture likes and cares about. Warhol said that Pop was "about liking things," and you can argue that his Marilyns and soup cans were their own study of beauty within the mode of a depthless American earnestness. But if so, then it's possible that Warhol was the one who killed beauty, because I can't think of anything that's been in the museum since (except for the faux-naïf: works by Etel Adnan, David Hockney, Salman Toor) that is beautiful for the sake of celebration, beautiful without disruption or provocation, beauty that lets you get comfortable with it. The value our culture prizes mostly highly today might be a willful discomfort: the strong, nervous desire to step beyond our own boundaries---which, if true, is remarkable only for showing how little art actually affects us, how entrenched our biases and blinkered perspectives really are. This is not exactly a state of affairs worth celebrating.
Hegel believed in art as the self-revelation of the divine in man. Hegel believed a lot of crazy things, like that history was a rational process of self-actualization, which would eventually culminate in a serene civilization beyond the brutality of conflict. That utopian vision of a world beyond history has been pursued by thinkers as ideologically different as Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama. I think we've come far along enough in life - having new technologies unlock the putatively full promise of human potential only to be dragged back into the primordial depths of hatred, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and geographic disputes - to realize that such visions of a future beyond history are ludicrous.
But a conception of history as progressive does make sense for a history of art, whose milestones are cherished, widely circulated, and self-demonstrating. Art history has been an exercise in linear progression, and the many movements and -isms it birthed represent a perfect example of Hegel's primary understanding of history as a dialectical process. The thesis of one movement became the antithesis of the other until an overriding synthesis of styles between them produced something new. This is essentially the same constellation of factors art historians use to identify the work of any stylistic period, whether it's Realism and Symbolism giving way to the Baroque, Futurism and Dada giving way to Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop making way for Minimalism. Only now, we find ourselves in an era beyond movements. Is this what the end of art history looks like?
As it happens, Hegel wasn't sure that great art would make it as far as the end of history (which, to be sure, he saw coming quite soon, possibly within his own lifetime in early 18^th^ century Germany), and theorized that it may already be in decline. His evidence was that even the great artists of his era (namely Goethe) could not exceed the great artists of eras past, like Homer and Dante. He suggested that the best art was made during eras that lacked reflective irony, the ability to step back and evaluate things. If that's the case, we may be living through an era of great art, which will only be definitively evaluated and understood as such at another time, when our philosophical faculties are higher. For Hegel, the emergence of climactic, post-historical serenity negated the need or purpose of art, which could only crudely express the abstract thought of the self-actualized being through a more basic, sensory form. This is another indication that we are still in an era of good art at a time when history rages around us with no end in sight.
So, to be precise, the great German philosopher was wrong on both counts: Art has proven itself remarkably enduring, while the end of history, or at least our emergence into a more enlightened chapter of it, seems remarkably elusive. But I do think he was right about the value we can and should give to art at its best: the revelation of the divine (which Hegel called das Absolute) through sensory experience - the use of the forms from nature and scenes from daily life to attempt to show us a deeper truth below the surface-level reality. An attempt to elucidate our uncertain relationship to a Higher Power. Is it hopelessly nostalgic or woo-woo to still care and seek out such things in the world today? I don't think so.
I could name a great many movies, books, and operas that do this through a narrative mode, probing delicately at some immense mystery or other. But it is something I rarely, if ever, find in the contemporary visual art I see around the city today, much of which would need to engage seriously with a certain vision of beauty to summon the absolute. I would propose that, with visual art, the relationship has now changed. We no longer need a philosophically minded art criticism, because much of the art on display now is itself critical, or at least ironic, to the point that it does not express a positive or aspirational point of view.
Hegel viewed irony as "infinite absolute negativity" that arises from a lack of partisanship to any one cause, belief system, or school of thought. The best works of art emerged from and celebrated a closed-off way of thinking: Greek society for Homer, medieval Catholicism for Dante. But the philosophers and critics of Hegel's time had begun to understand irony as a vacillation between possibilities, a commitment to nothing, which was, in its inability to articulate a coherent and positivist philosophy, ultimately destructive of meaning and concomitant social values. This was not the way to achieve the most righteous post-historical society. Today, we instinctively understand irony as a kind of toxic dark humor. As before the internet represents the obvious culprit. But I think understanding much of today's art as ironic in the sense that it makes a point against one or many belief systems, rather than in favor of any one, helps reveal what is going on among artists today and why their creations are of dubious value.
Irony is not a philosophy - it is a lack of commitment to any one point of view. This explains why it's so hard to categorize or philosophically assimilate much of the art one sees today. Viewed with a desire to ferret out irony, however, it immediately becomes clearer what many of these works have in common and what they are trying (consciously or not) to do with themselves. Irony cannot fit into movements, but it can certainly be identified by its tropes. All of which, if not revealing before us the divine nature of humanity and our capacity for brilliance, at least helps resolve some smaller mysteries of where this art came from and why it is now before us.
I'll give two examples: themes from contemporary art that I see everywhere but could not articulate until I began writing this piece. They are The Discarded Object and The Exploded Image.
The Discarded Object could be mistaken for trash. This is precisely the point or shock of the work. It is debased, presented without a pedestal, usually below eye level. Its status, and the discovery that, on closer inspection, it has usually been carefully prepared in some way, begets several questions. Who made it? Who lost it? What value does it now have, or could ever possibly have? This kind of art is perfect for an era in which other art (commercial art) is both philosophically agnostic and readily snapped up by the market. People hunger for stuff that (absent a divining theory of aesthetics) is rarely ugly but often stupid. The ugliness and smartness of the discarded object critiques this speculation of value by holding anyone within the gallery space in suspicion as a potential connoisseur. Oh, you like this sort of thing? Bend over. Get on your hands and knees to see me. It's a form of light sadism.
The Discarded Object is often colorless, blending in or mimicking the institutional or industrial setting it's in. In this sense, there's a vague reference to the banal, destructive, and polluting nature of the world around it. This is art about trash, and by taking it seriously, it grants the viewer the virtue of feeling like they are cleaning up the beach, rescuing the aesthetic environment through appreciative insight as they hope to rescue the natural environment by determined mindfulness. Examples include Darren Bader, Ser Serpas, and Paige K. Bradley, and most of the bad art you see around downtown today.
The Exploded Image takes itself much more seriously than the Discarded Object, but (ironically) it speaks from less of a moral high ground. It discloses a sense of wonder and terror at the state of the world today, which is so riven with images that it would be hard to imagine our sense of sight as limited to just the things before us. The presence of screens, advertising, and visual displays is so overwhelming that sight itself has become rhizomatic. The way an internet of hyperlinks and pop-ups is hypertextual, the physical world today is hypervisual, and that's terrifying because, unlike the internet, we have less of a choice to walk around a physical world populated by idealized advertising and the exhortatory optimism of marketing copy. A plague of images infects the urban landscape today.
The Exploded Image takes stock of this with a perspective of terror, knowing how easily manipulated and essentially conjured such images are. Examples include photographers like Win McCarthy, Christopher Williams and Anna Rubin, but also sensualist painters like Issy Wood, Srijon Chowdhury, and Giangiacomo Rossetti. Such painters today are exhibiting either a literal multiframe hypervisual realism (as with Wood) or more subtly mimicking the odd perspectival impulses of the iPhone camera (especially its 0.5x lens, per Chowdhury).
Both of these aesthetic strategies apprehend the visual world from a skeptical or negative stance. But it's a testament to the power of art that these tropes, when done well, can escape the black hole of their own ironic pessimisms. Anxieties about trash (Where does it all go? How can so much be discarded on our planet without slowly choking us to death?) and attention (Where does it all go? What shadowy agents are directing, optimizing, and monetizing mine without my knowledge?) are two of the most saturated and omnipresent concerns of Americans at all rungs of society today. They affect each one of us on a deeply personal level, in ways that make us feel complicit. The forces behind these fears are apparitional, unapprehendable, and baked into the structures of contemporary life. As such, there is almost no method for cogent social organizing around them or any sense of political redress. Without articulation, without mandate, art has sprouted up like seedlings through cracks in the pavement to fill this aching void. Here is art, despite its irony, attempting to assert an ancient and broadly useful function - to relieve us of something, even if that relief is through chastisement. To sublimate something, even if that sublimation is made literal and visual. To instruct us, even if that instruction is hermetic.
Is this a new era? Is it possible that, after spending enough time in Warhol's world-as-gift-shop - sifting through junk, eyed by security and expected to buy something - we have finally found the exit, an art "about hating things"? If so, it will require new criteria, one that does not merely treat irony in kind with its own cool-headed negation but acknowledges the frightened yearning that exists below the surface of so many of these works. It will require a critical engagement prepared to sift through the detritus of art-as-trash and see past the spectacle of art-as-distraction to excavate deeper epistemic truths these works pose about the conditions of our shared reality. But the hardest task (the one I'm not sure that criticism is up for) is that it will have to invert the typically imagined dynamic between object and discourse and articulate something positive from work that is overwhelmingly negative.
Taking the task seriously will mean locating an ideal to reach towards, despite the many ordeals we might instead wish to kick away from. That will naturally come off as trite or naïve from the chorus of ironists who believe that maintaining a tight, myopic focus on everything that's wrong with the world is a better use of time than nurturing what's right. But a positivist criticism is more subversive yet, because it suggests restarting Hegel's old wheel in its slow turn toward a propulsive, progressively utopian history. To what end?
Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 20- August 11, 2024). Ser Serpas, taken through back entrances subtle fate matching matte thing soiled …, 2024. Photograph by Ron Amstutz