suggestions for things to read and watch

Danke, Gloria!

another reaction to the Kissick text by Martin Herbert

https://artreview.com/can-you-age-out-of-the-artworld-opinion-martin-herbert-dean-kissick-harpers/

https://manhattanartreview.com/cornering.html

Sean Tatol

„Dean’s midlife art crisis is a simple, familiar one: like many people in the art world, his life and career may be organized around art but he’s not really interested it, per se. It’s the thing he pokes around in to find material, but his interest in art doesn’t go beyond it existing as a given. That seemed to be a common crisis during the Covid lockdowns, when many artists and art world people, extricated from the social system of openings, after parties, gossip, being emotionally abused at their gallery job by the directors, etc., woke up out of a stupor and wondered why they bothered with any of this drudgery in the first place. It’s easy to be drawn to the freedom of being an artist when you decide to go to art school, or the parties and the possibility of fame and success in your twenties, but once the dour reality of the art system sets in and you’re no longer young it’s significantly harder to be optimistic. A real, lasting engagement with art is no simple pleasure; the enjoyment is always fraught and fleeting, not an ever-deepening transcendental experience. A belief in the possibility of unceasing harmony and beauty can only be sustained by naive ignorance, like that of a new-age pseudospiritual positivist or a romantic narcissist. Art’s aspiration may be toward an ideal, but that ideal is not attained more readily as one studies more thoroughly. On the contrary, the greatest joys of art are those of first exposure, like most joys. There’s a real excitement in understanding something new about art, but there aren’t an infinite number of new worlds to be discovered. After you first grasp abstract painting or conceptualism or the Baroque, every subsequent experience becomes a more familiar repetition of a theme; even transcendence can become a conventional experience. This is an unavoidable fact of aging and maturity, no matter how much anyone may try to avoid it. The challenge is to resist this repetition becoming dullness and drudgery by an investment of interest in the process itself, which in this case we could call a love of art. The love is for the intricate particularities of art’s function in the case of specific artworks, an artist’s work in general, what it was in a specific era, sustained attention and the incremental process of understanding, not being pulled out of your shoes into a revelation of the face of god on a weekly basis. What a critic should offer is a sense of that familiarity with art’s nature and substance, its intangible but recognizable qualities. Dean’s confusion seems to be because art used to be something that happened to him; weird things kept coming across his path and it was enough for him to tell people about it. I’ll grant that art was a lot weirder a decade ago, but that’s not inherently how it should be, nor can anyone in any coherent way encourage that weirdness to come back. At any rate, what he’s campaigning for isn’t a renewal of art itself. An idealizing nostalgia for a past period can pretend that art once was a utopian absolute, but it never was and can’t ever truly be that perfect. Art only becomes a lasting pleasure as a marathon of prolonged engagement with art in general as a field of inquiry, not in the singularity of a once-and-for-all sublimity. The artist makes their work but they never make a final, perfect masterpiece because the frustrated aspiration for finality always remains in the finished artwork. (…)“