On Dean Kissick's Article in Harper's
A good and necessary piece by a critic who longs for a past just as much as the art and artists he decries.
A number of friends and acquaintances sent me Dean Kissick’s piece in Harper’s and asked for my take. Rather than replying to all of the DMs I’m writing it up here. If you haven’t read the piece, do that first before continuing. Not only because most of what I’ve written assumes you have, but also it’s worth the read! Dean is a good a writer and a good critic. What he’s written is worth your time, whether you agree with him or not.
Dean Kissick needed a better editor. He was let down. “The Painted Protest” (not likely his title) is too long. But more, he was going after a memoir sensibility that a lot of writing on art – a lot of writing period! – is taken with of late. That in and of itself isn’t a problem, but it’s a schtick, and one would hope that the good writers and critics of culture — Dean is one! — could innovate on form as much as offer insights; and that editors would push them in these directions, or keep them from the cliches of the genre.
Now that thing about Dean’s mother being hit by a bus while on her way to the Barbican to see a show about the politics of textiles: that should have been cut. It’s a hook, it could have been a good one, but it turns out not to be. That’s the editor’s job. The accident, Dean’s mother’s loss of her legs, what’s it for? This jab about the Barbican show: “It was the most depressing exhibition I had ever seen at the gallery, hardly worth a visit, let alone losing one’s legs.” And that’s it. This is gratuitous, the definition of it. Is seeing any art worth losing a limb, let alone two? It’s a stupid question to ask. It’s a waste of mental energy to even contemplate. The editor’s thinking here must have been: “Oooh, strong opener; it will keep people reading and get them talking and sharing.” Maybe that was Dean’s thinking too. But what’s good for publishing is sometimes just bad for the writer.
Dean had already shared pictures of his mother in hospital over Instagram. So perhaps it was inevitable her story would find its way into his writing. And perhaps that itself is somehow a formal innovation. The odd bit of highly traumatic, high-intensity revelation making it into the “feed” of the piece, but then quickly taking its place in the grid as just another random image from a life lived by the algorithm. Kissick isn’t Knausgaard, though. Autofictional critique could be something, if it wasn’t already presaged by the house style of The New Yorker or the Rachels (Kushner, Cusk) when they write about art.
More substantively, the piece is a lament, but what it laments most is a lost lifestyle. Dean misses the “art world” before 2014, which, he writes, “was where you would find the broadest remit to do whatever you wanted. It was where you could find the most unusual and preposterous ideas—and open bars, sex, and glamour too.” Artists were the embodiment of this lifestyle. “Artists could do whatever they pleased; they were famous, respected, and sexually desirable; they could turn anything into art and create their own reasons for doing so; they made huge amounts of money for not doing very much.” And that was a good thing.
Today artists are constrained by history and identity and a small-“C” conservatism, all of which is true. The art of the past decade, particularly the art promoted by the museums and the big international biennials, has been the product of what Dean cleverly identifies as a “missionary zeal in reverse”: “rather than crisscrossing the globe and stealing the natives’ souls with cameras, curators now bring painted images of more primitive ways of life back to the disenchanted West so that viewers might be healed by their embodied knowledge, or otherwise access a direct link to the time before the Fall, to a paradise unspoiled by Trump, populism, Silicon Valley, globalization, modernity, the Enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, whiteness, linear time, and the Agricultural Revolution.”
But if the artists all long for “different pasts” by which to “escape the present,” it’s quite plain that Dean does too. Perhaps that’s a past prior to 2014, when sex and glamour were still part of the art world. Perhaps that’s a past prior to 2024 when Dean’s mother lost her legs after being hit by a bus on her way to see an art exhibition (I want that past for Dean too). But the work that Dean likes best he compares to a “Paolo Sorrentino scene about the ecstasy and sadness of life” while at the same time “wishing” that more work attempted “to create utopian spaces or communities, to open minds up to new possibilities, and so make life feel more expansive.” I suspect that many artists today, many concerned with or trapped by their pasts, think that this is exactly what they’re doing. And as for Sorrentino, don’t the ecstasy and sadness of his films issue exactly from the cynical reason that settles in when you don’t believe in, or can’t imagine, a (better) future? When one has sought out a lifestyle, life itself looks like nothing as much as a loved one laid up inside a hospital room.
Anyway, it’s not clear that this is what Dean wants after all, because at a different moment he says that, rather than having his “awareness raised,” he wants to “view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject.” He recalls seeing videos of Viennese actionists and how this became imprinted as a pinnacle of the avant-garde’s twentieth-century inflammations, a model for how affecting art could be. This tearing and opening and mysteriousness has a long pedigree as a salve for aesthetic ennui. I commissioned an essay from the philosopher Simon Critchley more than a decade ago that prescribed the same things as a remedy for the moment that Dean recalls fondly.
Yes, Dean did give voice to a sensibility that many of us have been feeling over the past five years. The art world and its institutions and its gatekeepers went very far in the direction of protest and politics and the #resistance. Dean is writing, in the open, after Donald Trump‘s historic return to office, about a sensibility that many people would talk about but few would record. Good. Done. That was necessary. What’s next?
The past that Dean wants is Romanticism, or something like it (a neo neoRomanticism?). As he writes, “Art should do more than communicate: it should move us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees. It is, along with music, the purest expression of the human spirit.” I keep hearing Walter Pater here, and I’ve heard it before. We all have. It’s not wrong. It’s just the past again. It’s the kind of thing that shows up in a monologue in a Sorrentino film.
To be fair to Dean, I don’t know exactly what I want from art right now either. But it’s not any kind of Romanticism, and it’s definitely not resistance or other ways of knowing or community or anything that critics like Aruna D’Souza would generally like and write about. I want more ideas. Better ideas. And it’s possible that these won’t come from artists, or not artists alone. But let me put this out there:
I want more Pierre Huyghe. I want more Sarah Meyohas. I want more Tavares Strachan. I want more Leigh Ledare. I want more Stan Douglas. I want more Matthew Barney. I want more Meriem Bennani.
Like Dean, I want more “world building,” but I want that world building to come from artists working with technology and technologists at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence and machine learning and rapid prototyping with novel materials and techniques and contexts. I want more moving images that edit themselves and mimic, if not make, the very rudiments of intended meaning. I want more robots, not to paint dumb paintings to sell at auction, but to provide the inputs and training sets for some artificial general intelligence to come. I want more boundary-pushing thought – thinking – and whatever emotions or affects come with running up against its limits, not in some neoRomantic sublime, but in a genuine Event in the pattern of Being (yes, I want more Alain Badiou). I want to come face to face with the posthuman spirit and recognize it for what it is and to have it recognize me too.
The chances of all of this happening with a vastly bigger tent of art and artists, a vastly bigger concept of an “art world” (to invoke Arthur Danto, as does Dean), are better than they were before, when the elite cultures of museums and universities defined what and who could be seen in terms of art. We have to admit that. But the vast majority of the art being made today — the art Dean doesn’t like and the art he does — doesn’t even want to think about art in the terms I’ve just described. That majority will say it’s too big, too technical, too expensive, too impersonal, too accelerationist, too corporatist, too fascistic, too inhuman, all, in its way, “absolutely-too-much,” as Critchley wrote. But that doesn’t make me want to see it any less.
Yes, I recognize the irony of declaiming the ills of poor editing and the need for editors on a platform designed for self-publishing. Think of this admission as another way of saying that comments, editorial and otherwise, are welcome.
I like Dean but I don’t think anything he says is particularly accurate - the art world may have changed in the last decade, but not in the way he discusses. Most notable has been its diversification, which has increased dramatically and changed the face (quite literally) of art success. A kind of curatorial world-saving pomposity certainly goes back more than ten years; Okwui Enweazer’s Documenta which had not one but four “platforms” was in 2002, and Venice had “super-curators” long before that. True, you can argue that we don’t have art movements any more, we just have market movements, where a kind of esthetic pluralism makes all art equal, its relative value measured in market results. All art is the same, and all art is merely decorative - which may be its truest use in any case. Criticism as a result is vitiated, reduced to discussing idiotic stylistic cycles, like a “return of figuration” or such nonsense. Still, the market as always feeds on novelty, virtuosity, sentiment, and museum curators work hard to draw some meaning, any meaning out of the mess, an uphill climb, as can be seen at the Whitney, where triumphant solo exhibitions of winning individual artists out-headline more thoughtful and diverse selections from the permanent collection.
Great response. When you're saying that new boundary pushing art should be 'prototyping with novel materials and bleeding edge of artificial intelligence' etc. it might be worth revisiting why most of post-internet art, that tried to be technological, failed to say anything about our relationship with technology.
Event if after the last years they almost have a golden age sheen.
It's just so easy, as an artist, to repeat the internet, make your own AI, build your own MMORPG, and call it a day. Easy enough to walk into the same trap again.
Kudos for anybody facing the posthuman tho.