Artforum's New-Media Uproar | Art Fag City at the L Magazine

Artforum’s actual readership—mainstream gallerists, parents of art students who never changed their mailing address, and coffee table owners—has pretty much been silent. They’re not a crowd, by nature, that sets itself to long internet arguments about the state of art today. But we shouldn’t forget that they are for whom Bishop was writing: a great analog horde who can hear the digital apocalypse coming but don’t know which way to run. Rather than reading Bishop’s article as ignorant navel-gazing from art’s ruling class, we should read it for what it is: a proposal for change, the beginnings of a pivot, and a way for mainstream art to claim it’s moving forward without either making everything free (because of digital reproducibility) or lolcats (because lol).

Take the growing ubiquity of selection as a creative act. We know it’s valuable, because we like Tumblrs. We know it’s creative, because some Tumblrs are better than others. But if you want to make the case that it’s contemporary art, you’re better off making Bishop’s roundabout half-argument about Rashid Johnson’s shelf art—in short, that it’s new because the connections matter more than the objects—rather than pointing to one of net art’s many surf clubs, where the difference between creation and curation has been eroding for years. Our new value system must be emerging and exciting and occasionally unprecedented, but we should be able to see it in the art we already own, and we’d prefer that it didn’t drive anyone out of business. After the requisite decades of outright exclusion, the assimilation of new-media art will be slow and spotty, like the rehabilitation of a rebel militia. The establishment will pick out a few grassroots stars who aren’t too dangerous, artists like Arcangel or Ryan Trecartin who work in bankable media, while pushing out a few trusted souls like Bishop’s artists to scout the new frontier. As with video art, we will endure decades of necromancy, as gradually more confident gallerists unearth one more very influential new media artist every six months. There will be no parade, but a few people will eventually be able to pay their bills.

“[Baudelaire’s] rejection of Courbet simply means that, having his own ideals, he was not prepared to sacrifice the things that Courbet had discarded. Courbet himself, like any good artist, pursued only his own positive goals; the discarded values (for example, fantasy, “ideal beauty”) had long lost their positive virtues for him, and thus were no loss. But they were still felt as a loss by Baudelaire, who perhaps imagined that fantasy and ideal beauty were yet unexhausted. And I think this is what it means, or may mean, when we say that a man, faced with a work of modern art, isn’t “with it.” It may simply mean that, having a strong attachment to certain values, he cannot serve an unfamiliar cult in which these same values are mocked.” by Leo Steinberg, from Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public

“The works of Hirschhorn and Sierra stand against Bourriaud’s claims for relational aesthetics, the microtopian communities of Tiravanija, and the scenario formalism of Gillick. The feel-good positions adopted by Tiravanija and Gillick are reflected in their ubiquitous presence on the international art scene, and their status as perennial favorites of a few curators who have become known for promoting their preferred selection of artists (and thereby becoming touring stars in their own right). In such a cozy situation, art does not feel the need to defend itself, and it collapses into compensatory (and self-congratulatory) entertainment. The work of Hirschhorn and Sierra is better art not simply for being better politics (although both of these artists now have equally high visibility on the blockbuster art circuit). Their work acknowledges the limitations of what is possible as art (“I am not an animator, teacher, or social-worker,” says Hirschhorn) and subjects to scrutiny all easy claims for a transitive relationship between art and society.” by Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”

“De Kooning’s both-not-one-or-another position allowed him to engage visionary visual tools to imagine and decipher the universe. Yet at the time this cost him dearly. Clement Greenberg called keeping the figure in his art a major mistake and claimed de Kooning was in decline. Robert Hughes lambasted his art as “self-parody.” Jackson Pollock, whom de Kooning always spoke of admiringly, railed, “Bill, you betrayed it. You’re doing the figure. You’re still doing the same goddamned thing.” At the same moment, the young, gifted Robert Rauschenberg showed up at his studio door, asked for and received one of de Kooning’s drawings, and erased it” by Jerry Saltz