The Brooklyn Rail, July/Aug 2024
I get the news on art in the morning, with mostly news from the Western art world and places emulating the scripts and models invented for another time and geography.
I am often shocked at the news that some artist has become the art world’s darling, showing in some gallery as if these things matter. It feels so far away from my reality. There used to be at least two art worlds, one around the market and power, the other outside it. They were however in cohabitation with some porosity between them. I am now convinced that they have turned into two different realities altogether. I look at “first world” art as a sort of mid-nineteenth century salon painting, one that is fed down our throats by power. The museums of the 1 percent are a joke that has gone on far too long. Art practice is no longer about a white wall and some stuff on it in some zombie institution somewhere in the world. Like the salon painting of the nineteenth century, much of today’s art—including artists like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović, and Anish Kapoor—will go into the dustbin.
In meetings when we look at projects, a great colleague of mine often asks, “Where is the art in it?” It is always a good question about what art can become and what art has been as a conduit to enrich our thinking about the world around us. But what if we delve deeper? What if we consider the artwork itself not for its object status, but as an agent that has the capacity to arrest the world for a moment and make us think? What if it has the potential to trigger a before-and-after, not just in our personal reflections, but also in discourse?
After modernism, the languages of art changed again in a way you may call catechism. The figure of the artist, as an exception who produces in a privatized tongue, began to be replaced by languages that ensured access to the practice. However, I still struggle to resolve what happens when these language conventions are extracted from the work. What if there is nothing left: no residual—the essential thing I cannot name? What matters is the density and effectiveness of an artistic proposition, the hidden buttress, the force with which it can change my thinking. If not so, art may be the same as many other practices, like a text you read or a discussion you engage with. The art historian in me is trained in a Euro-American tradition engrained with notions of exceptionality, the aura, etc. I must remind myself that I should just engage with this tradition as an artifact. Granted, as a curator, I’ve delivered many such artworks to the public and treated them like artifacts in my practice. Their historical stamina did not have to be an issue as long as the exhibitions addressed and generated meaning from a time and context, bringing forth discussions not held before. The issue is that artwork does not change alone; it also changes with the outside, who it talks to, and how it communicates.
We no longer imagine one public and have long since replaced the “viewer” with the concept of a diversity of users, constituents that short-circuit an unidirectional flow. Where does that leave my agency as a writer, operating in the space between work and viewer, giving voice to a silent public? As a writer, I often struggle to know where I fit in this landscape. How does one even begin to write about an artist who starts a seed bank? How does one art critic begin to speak about an art practice that asks for such different sets of knowledge and expertise? Then again, most artistic “research” is often neither research nor art, and everything is wrong with the concept. We know it is not research when it merely colonizes or appropriates scholarship and deals solely with secondary sources. How do we separate the average from the striking? There are always differences, as there were between the first Abstract Expressionists and those who came out of art school factories of the late 1950s. Which one would you engage in? I won’t buy it when art shows me what is already there.
Sometimes we’re looking at the wrong place and can’t remove ourselves from the moment we are trapped in. Such is my experience with the art world today. It’s a frustrating encounter that often leaves me constantly questioning the very nature of art and its place.
vasıf kortun 