Judgment Days: A Response to the Kissick and Tatol Articles

The Pillars of Creation. NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?

Contemporary Art has been falling for a long time now, and early Caesura tried to give what was falling an extra push. Whereas Tatol's article continues this tradition of “late criticism,” indicating that contemporary art dies hard, Kissick's is an attempt to artificially resuscitate what can't and shouldn't be. I agree with Kissick's too-rare sensibility that expects art to be transcendently beautiful, an ideal which Contemporary Art was, however, categorically incapable of even pursuing — CA was constructed atop the taboo on transcendent beauty. Due to its deep postmodern "expanded field" roots, CA was also anti-painting, not to mention anti-originality. As a whole, CA was anti-art in ideology. Amidst increasing cynicism, Kissick's clarification that we were once excited about Contemporary Art is important — as I explored in my Amacher essay from 2022. But his hope for resurrection is ultimately self-contradictory, vague, and yes, historically small-minded. Contemporary art was never great, and his golden era was already a decline from anti-art mediocrity to administrative opportunism. While the original excitement around it was sincere and not-nothing, it takes some real critical effort to clarify the content of that excitement so it amounts to something palpable, more than a passing trend. Since this never happened and never will, CA simply dissipated. Its time has passed. By 2016, CA had proven itself pathetically behind the times, rearguard; how much more so today. CA will certainly continue to live on past the moment of its realization but will exude a melancholia that is not at all desirable or adequate for the more complex feelings of being alive today, nor for the formal possibilities of art beyond CA's limited framework. At most it is a cautionary tale of not seizing the day, with a paradoxical aspect, considering CA aimed to be about nothing but the day. But a cautionary tale for whom? 

While I agree wholeheartedly with Tatol's values of critical judgment, as well as his earthly orientation, critical judgment will ultimately be led by artists or not at all. For nearly a century the “critical artist” has been upheld as an ideal, while the judgment necessary to achieve this ideal was restrained or made a mockery of. And returning to the romantic naive artist is both impossible and undesirable. Now that judgment's demanded — primarily due to critics like Laurie Rojas, Troy Sherman, Tatol, and The Young Caesurians — it will have to be artists who lead by example with it, not critics. As I've always maintained, the best critics are artists and vice versa (Baudelaire, etc). It's doubtful that young artists are reading Kissick or MAR and receiving the direction or inspiration they need — such direction only artworks can provide. In the absence of such commanding artworks, criticism tries to pull weight that it can't. A criticism unmediated by art practice is not at all sufficient criticism either, and that seems to be what has been going on since postmodernism. Bad habits die hard. Some try to make good on this eclipsed hope for a truly critical art, in hopes of a newer avant-garde that can sincerely mediate history, theory and practice. Is the time finally ripe for the critical artist? How would such a character be formed? And yet, detoxing from the pseudo-theory-and-practice of the last half century, even some of the most thoughtful young artists fear unifying the two. Romantic habits also die hard.

In such a saturated, over-productive culture, a critic ultimately has to assess if anything they've critiqued remains compelling after seeing it in the light. Is there any art of substance illuminated, or are critics simply enamored with their flashlights? Personally, I assessed and primarily saw La Monte Young's music project remaining one of the few with substance in our era. What do other critics find? Kissick seems to find it in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s style discourse and hobnobbing. I saw no beauty or substance in his golden era, but rather bloated, formless academicism desperately struggling for relevance that the work itself was unworthy of. The abstract curatorial tendencies of this culture represented an administrative move, a resignation from any guiding art practice, creative paralysis made into a virtue — highly calculated and yet not adding up. Not, at least, compared to the masterpiece Young had achieved, which deserted and then transcended postmodern dogma, creating something sincerely beautiful, elegant, and original from out of a critical confrontation with music history (e.g., Pythagoras, Bach, etc.), and thereby implicitly waging a critique of the era's resignationism and aesthetic insincerity. Young's school also learns about art on a practical as well as theoretical level; there's an integration that actually works and yields compelling music instead of short-circuiting the creative process as contemporary art and theory do. I could go on and on about it, and certainly have, even if there are some problems there in paradise. The point, however, is that in the ambitiousness, aesthetic sincerity, intellectual clarity, and formal success of Young’s work we find the greatest critique of contemporary nihilism and aesthetic mediocrity of the last half century. And he's not a critic. The mere existence of such an art is critical, even though there is something indeed special about great works of art in that they almost seem not to exist, as if they exist in a domain of experience that is out of our reach. Great artworks have a virtuality to them. But are there ears to hear? Artworks are the ultimate judges, the real critiques of society by negating the public's aesthetic repression, a repression which has now been completely industrialized by CA into predigested art experiences. Artworks categorically defy repression by delimiting the core aspects of aesthetic form, in this example tone, rhythm, harmony, imagination, vibration — phenomena appealing to all but which most are now discouraged from leaning into. Albeit only ideally or in rare circumstances, it seems, does this defiance happen. As Nietzsche said, "No artist tolerates reality." Or, Trotsky — "Art is a protest against reality." But let's face it, many artists today are reality's lap dogs. 

The concealed nihilism of Kissick's socialite golden age — which developed few if any concrete artistic objects of sincere and sustained interest — warmly welcomed the vapid woke art that came after. If "politics destroyed" CA, it's only because CA was both weak and courted the destruction; a destruction not simply by "politics," but by bad politics. Woke art consolidated all the subgenres of CA, from social art to figurative painting, all of which were generally built on the same neoliberal political ideologies going back at least to the 90s. Was there more and better sex before the woke era? Yes. Was there more humor? Yes. More openness? In some ways, yes; in others, no. These seem to be the main virtues of Kissick's CA culture. Yet recall that it was also an anti-art era of sophist writers proudly proclaiming they've never had aesthetic experiences. Sad! This is modernity, everything is aesthetic to varying degrees, what could they possibly be talking about? Was it ignorance? "Subversion" of aesthetics? Legit anaesthetic numbness? I sense a lot of active critics, “theorists”, and worse, artists, are now pathologically afraid of aesthetics as a result of CA's anti-art posturing. Perhaps it's the skeptic's open mind required of criticism to do its job that places this taboo, but it could also well be a failure of judgment. Ego weakness, pathological indecision, paralysis. Is this cultural failure, then, a failure of art, or of criticism? Certainly there are inherent limits and contradictions to cultural criticism that many new critics are blind to. Criticism in our era — and everyone's a critic to some degree — can also simply be a means to predigest aesthetic experience, doing the thinking and experiencing for the viewer so they don't have to do the work themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in museum texts or curated spotify playlists, where viewers and listeners outsource their aesthetic judgments to authorities. But such authoritarianism from the public, who wants to be told what to like and how to like it, is far more common than those acute examples, and also applies to multitudes of artists who only create in accordance with social trends, staying alert to trends the way a trainspotter waits for passing trains. Yet the tracks are already laid and circumscribed, the goods they carry already rationed out. 

This isn't to say such criticism shouldn't exist, but rather that if one's going to set an example of aesthetic reflection and love of art, they should actually do their job in exemplary form. Ultimately it's probably a combination of both art and criticism's failures, but more deeply a result of the confusion regarding what exactly the artistic values and standards are today. It's an ongoing confusion stemming from the transitional nature of life in modernity, where culture is always moving, which can be as exciting as it is terrifying. Most significant artists seem to have some acute sense of this contradiction. Currently, the biggest transition has been from ironic distance and taboos on beauty towards intimate sincerity and beauty, and much gets lost in what is essentially a chaotic transition that probably will not ultimately hold — there is indeed a place for distanced irony in art, and beauty was suspended for real historical reasons. "It's for the sake of the beautiful that beauty no longer exists" (Adorno). Nevertheless, there's a point at which a thoughtless servitude to ugliness becomes formulaic and status quo. This is not just in CA, but in much of new music's rudderless timbral "experiments" that stake no hypotheses and draw no conclusions, assuming ugliness is inherently subversive. It's not. Where are the decisive artists and critics? Those who will not make a virtue of wallowing in the indecision characteristic of our formless age? At what point do critics quit? How much culture has to slip through one's hands? Judgment without an object ultimately leads to pseudo-activity. Critiquing dust becomes absurd. 

Personally, I resolved to distill any critical insights into my own art, which I felt was too often pushed into the background by the relevant conversations of our time, conversations which I'm skeptical of (skeptical in the scientific, keeping-an-open-mind kind of way). Many current conversations often obscure instead of clarify aesthetic experience; conversations in which artists and critics equally create and affirm. Reading a lot of “art writing”, seeing much art and listening to new music, I wonder who really has an ear for the music, so to speak. While re-committing to my art practice came at the expense of complete isolation from the culture, and having to work in "the genre of silence," it was a trade-off I was willing to make and haven't regretted. As Adorno once said, artists tend to side with the deserters, and I had already "opted to go underground." Upon reflection, it appeared that writing straightforwardly beautiful, clear, and formally innovative music could be the greatest critique of our culture's ugliness, convolution, and mediocrity. As this happened to coincide with my goals pre-art school in the early 00s — pre-miseducation for the most part — it was an easy decision. I knew I was on the right track when some relevant people would respond with warning shots, scandalized, "You can't do that today!" Art has to overcome the possible, and what's possible is often determined by a herd mentality that CA allowed to completely determine its content and social meaning. "How far I was from all this resignationism!" (Nietzsche)

Yet the upside to the formless chaos after CA is that there are no binding rules — the only remaining guide is the artist's aesthetic judgment, which should allow artists today to refeel history, and also feel the world anew — as ever! — by realigning with this judgment faculty. "Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what truly distinguishes original minds." (Nietzsche) Personally, I figured if someone couldn't buckle down and make masterpieces worthy of Young's lofty standards, then what's the point of all this criticism, which is exclusively meant to open minds to such critical art experiences. The artist today has to be bold enough to risk alienation and judge whether what's relevant actually measures up to their standards, whether it serves the imagination, "The queen of the faculties" (Baudelaire). If not, then what's relevant is simply not important. The current professional art standards are blatantly authoritarian when cultivating the opposite: the aestheticization of appeasing others, making a cultural virtue of conformism. This ego-weak, anti-enlightenment ideology is not just rampant in MFA departments, but threads Kissick's socialite values, the herd consciousness of the fickle market, and “political” social art subculture, producing a kind of kitsch that differs from craft fairs only in the amount of supplementary info justifying what shouldn't need to be — true artworks don't need our justification. Art is categorically not normative, and great artworks achieve a particularity that is all their own, transcending, challenging, and ultimately expanding the common knowledge, which doesn't need to be aestheticized. Are we honestly to accept that a conformist herd aesthetics is adequate? Politesse is not at all critical art. Quite the opposite. Kissick is obviously right on that front, though way late — it's something critics of CA since Claire Bishop have thoroughly clarified, and which was also said better by Nietzsche, Trotsky, and Adorno. Every artist must find their own way, and will inevitably have to go against the grain of the so-called collective at times, embrace social and aesthetic dissonance, perhaps to ultimately redeem social life, but at the very least to suspend it, to cast its values in the light of the skeptic's doubt, to be a "gay scientist." This is simply a byproduct of the creative process. Beyond this, only history can decide if the work transcends into something truly meaningful. 

Aesthetic judgment is still very much active, if often suppressed. We all, to varying degrees, implicitly recognize when something's interesting, and when it's bullshit. It's the critic's job to make this as explicit as possible — as hyperacute as possible — saying what is secretly known but not publicly acknowledged. Tatol has a talent for this, and the interest his criticism attracts reveals that many others have also privately noticed a poverty of art in the public, in the markets, in the academy, everywhere art is usually featured, but mostly NYC, where CA dies a very pompous, bloated death. True aesthetic experience is actually very private, not much of its substance has been brought to light, so we suppose it doesn't exist. It does, but in a shadowy kind of way. Yet it's in the shadows where profound change often occurs. As in psychoanalysis, saying the thing out loud changes it. Like artists, all critics are not the same, either — many are sincere, but many are clout-chasers desperate for relevance, who illuminate nothing. Insincerity and complaisance are common, and considering the manifold difficulties of making any impact in culture, it takes a sincere effort, at the very least, to do or recognize anything substantially new. In a historical moment defined by conformism and almost impenetrable character armor, truly a lot more than a sincere effort is required to reach into the souls of people. And yet art is able to do that if the artistic impulses are not resisted every step of the way. I hate to bring in pop psychology, but the entitlement of the culture shows — one cannot simply publish an incoherent article in a major magazine or have a NYC gallery show or release a mediocre album and believe that culture automatically changes as a result. Getting exposure is important, but only if there's something interesting exposed. What specifically would help move culture along is open to a debate that most seem unconcerned about because of complacency and complicity. Perhaps in nascent stages, at best, is this conversation developing, but it's a problem which many artists and critics alike seem incapable of confronting in any sustained way. As a result, change happens only chaotically; it is something that happens to us, and not that we have any mastery over.

Artists might seriously question what makes something successful as an artwork, and really challenge themselves more. This seems to me the subtext of both Kissick and Tatol's writing, and they're quite right in demanding more, vague as the demands are. Their writing is, of course, a symptom of CA woke art culture, where everyone is simply given awards undeservedly and standards mean nothing — it seems everyone wants to be awarded now, the aspiring wardens of culture. Personally, I think artists should turn inwards more, acquire sensitivity, learn gratitude for exceptional historical achievements, confidently turn their backs on social trends that don't work for their vision, practice thoughtful dissonance, become almost monkish, retune the ears, become curious for forms which demand it, strive for formal excellence instead of subversion … as preconditions to make something really moving. If artists don't bring the stars down to earth, who will? And to be in touch with the stars — ancient phenomena — one has to be in touch with deeper history. Socially, I'm attracted to the idea of artists forming sects and schools, à la Young's sect, or like the Bene Gesserit (but without the morality and resentment), even though this is not a direct solution to art's social problem. Ultimately, an avant-garde (hopefully it takes less than 10,000 years though). But forcing art to be “social” in the ugliest sense of the term is idiotic, it becomes neoliberalism as a culture, producing administrators, not artists. If there's anything to learn from the annoyingly stupid NFT thing, it's that a small group of outsiders can overcome a rigged insiders’ game and large-scale institutional cultural rackets. Would that they aspired to more than picking low-hanging fruit! Contemporary tastefakers also get it wrong by emphasizing the relevance of youth culture and trends — it generally takes decades to articulate an artistic voice, and the dead are always more compelling to artists. Notwithstanding a few poets, the greatest artists and composers have found their form in relatively old age. It may take some time, commitment, and readjustment, but a herd aesthetics based on vapid trends won't produce anything substantial, nor does it "critique society" … though it may bleat the loudest. And many are simply too afraid to be separated from the herd, a fear that shows in the mediocre, conformist art. It's not surprising that critics tire of looking at paintings made by sheep. True artists dislike drinking from the trough. 

Overall, this new art criticism thing Caesura's been doing since 2015, continued by MAR, MAQ, and others, and which Kissick has a herding dog's nose for, seems to me an attempt to build the preconditions for first recognizing aesthetic experience, and then demanding artists to sincerely challenge themselves so there's something to recognize. In my lifetime this really hasn't been on the agenda, so something in consciousness is indeed changing. But it's up to artists to make the real aesthetic critique of society that can be recognized, and who's making it? Patrick Zapien once remarked that he wanted Caesura to support the production of new masterpieces — who will dare to make such works? 

Let those who have ears hear.