Complaining that most art sucks is like saying that all new music is bad because you don’t like Spotify’s Top 50 playlist
In 1998, the gadfly American art journal Coagula put out a best-of volume called ‘Most Art Sucks’. I remember, at the time, finding that title equally amusing, intimidating and harsh, but I was in my mid-twenties and just getting to grips with contemporary art, and a quarter-century younger than the book’s most senior editor, the artist and publisher Walter Robinson. Now that I’m older than he was then, and have seen a lot more art, the book’s titular assertion seems accurate and timeless. At any point in history, most art – maybe 90 percent of it – likely sucks. (A similar amount will be washed away, too, if not necessarily the right stuff.) And that turns out to be fine so long as you come to expect it, and even easier to deal with if you have a masochistic side – sometimes, going round the galleries just means getting your steps in – but most people don’t start out feeling that way.
The art you come up with is usually exciting by default, partly because you don’t fully understand it, or – slightly later – because it feels like your generation is finally getting their say, and you’re young and (maybe) beautiful and out having fun every night. But then, not long after, the parallax shifts. Now you’re older than the emerging artists and they have their own crowd that you’re increasingly on the edges of, and maybe now those artists are doing things that to you either look meaningless or minor or retro, and before you know it they’re the new mainstream. You’re increasingly cranky, you miss the carefree old days, you can’t be bothered to truffle-hunt and, hey, it seems like most art sucks.
Anyway, in other news that you may already have heard, the New York-based British writer Dean Kissick recently published a widely read and commented-upon and divisive piece in Harpers entitled ‘The Painted Protest’. Subtitled ‘How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art’ and keen to position itself as a spiritual successor to Tom Wolfe’s 1975 jeremiad The Painted Word – itself first excerpted in Harper’s and lamenting that art had become illustrative of critics’ theories – Kissick’s piece argues that art’s convergence with politics over the last eight years or so has robbed art of its beauty and strangeness, its ability to make us weep and to open ‘portals into the mysterious’. ‘I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised,’ writes Kissick, who turns 41 this year.
Let’s move quickly past, but not ignore, the author’s documented proximity to the performatively/not-performatively anti-woke Dimes Square crowd in New York City – which can’t easily be separated from his disinterest in art rooted in identity politics – and alight on him noting, earlyish in his essay, that ‘Throughout my twenties… art felt very important’. He goes on to reminisce about being young and glamorous and free in the post-2008, post-Internet artworld. But then, by 2017, as that trend is dying from overexposure and as social justice movements are simultaneously gathering steam worldwide, artists from the global south and Indigenous artists and Black artists and more women are starting to be given voice. For Kissick, it’s initially exhilarating to see all this different art patchworked together. But then it becomes biennale orthodoxy and virtue-signaling and monotony. Suddenly, somehow art’s not fun or challenging or even interesting anymore.
I do have a bit of sympathy with this position – there is, for sure, a lot of art out there wherein what it is appears less important than who made it. Plus, outwardly, aesthetics have not moved forward much in the past decade. More the reverse: there’s a lot of painting and a lot of neo-relational work, not much having changed but the identities and priorities of the makers, and plenty of stuff that might have been considered, broadly, cultural activity by its makers that is now being repositioned (and sold) as art.
Of the work that was intended as art, meanwhile, there’s no reason why it should not conform to the likelihood-of-suckage theorem. But let’s try and zoom out here. Beyond a certain age – unless you’re a John Peel or a Hans Ulrich Obrist, the latter of whom Kissick interned with, and whose own alliances with creative youth look increasingly dodgy and desperate – the inner curmudgeon often swells and lurks. Certain time-of-life resistances kick in that you either have to find workarounds for or grouchily accept. But either way, you need to remain aware of your own fast-accumulating grudges, otherwise it’s never you, it’s always the new art to blame. Plus, after a decade or so, any dominant cultural form is at least superficially wearying – complaining at this point is like saying that all new music is bad because you don’t like Spotify’s Top 50 playlist – and contemporary art comes with the provocative bonus that if you criticise it, you’re implicitly racist and/or sexist.
And, finally, it’s not either/or. Some recent art mobilises ambiguity and mystery in the services of, say, identity concerns (at random: Rhea Dillon’s, itself part of a continuum of Black artistry that prioritises elusiveness). And there is also art out there that does not play into the dominant paradigm: in my experience, the quickest way to find it is to shoot your mouth off about how art is just this one thing now, then go round the galleries and let the ironical universe do its work. And if you don’t find it, maybe look somewhere other than the dozen galleries that have become your beat, your well-worn groove. Creative change, even if it feels slow, is always there; even if just a trickle, even if being shown in hole-in-the-wall spaces pointed towards via Discords or groupchats. None of the above, of course, is useful in the construction of sweeping, self-serving, dog-whistling cultural narratives, but being aware of and acting upon it might add to an ageing artworld denizen’s personal happiness. Because if you’re fixated on the good times being all in the past, it’s time to give up and become an art historian.
