Scare Quotes

“Wither contemporary art”—the handy removal of an h turned the would-be question into a dreary statement, the title of a conversation at the SVA Theatre between critic Dean Kissick and edgeladies Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, of the Red Scare podcast. Few art critic talks have a ticket price ($25, in this case). Few draw lines that stretch down the block. But this one, occasioned by Kissick’s viral cover story for the December 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “The Painted Protest,” was the most mobbed art talk I’ve ever attended, filling nearly all of the theater’s 479 seats.

“The Painted Protest” riffs on an essay published half a century ago in the same magazine by the conversative critic Tom Wolfe, “The Painted Word.” Where Wolfe complained (correctly) that theories of art had supplanted art, Kissick griped that moralizing identity politics have done the same. No shit. The essay was loved by few and discussed by everyone, barging into group chats and holiday gatherings like a drunk uncle. The talk seemed positioned as Kissick’s coup de grâce, but like contemporary art, it withered. It nearly put me to sleep.

Excepting a few penny-dreadful shockers—Warhol was an incel, something or someone is cucked—the chatter stuck to the beats of Kissick’s essay. Was post-internet art ever exciting? Of course. Was there a “serious political impulse used in cynical ways by people who want to sell art?” Indeed. Is idpol the cause or the symptom of today’s art-world neuroses? Unclear. Khachiyan suggested that “everybody was better off getting wasted and blowing lines at Gavin Brown.” Her diagnosis of the present moment: So many panel discussions and so little art. Yet here we all were.

“Everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a tradition, however recent,” Kissick wrote in his broadside, “we just long for different pasts.” For him it was the halcyon days of celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (for whom Kissick interned in 2008) and his global café society of relational aesthetes. Those optimistic aughts and early teens when art might have been “the gateway to every other form of culture and philosophy” and “a map of the present, a new universal.” I remember that moment. It did feel important. It felt like art mattered, like Thomas Hirschhorn’s cardboard forts might tape together a better end of history. I rode the Hudson line into the city to see Jonathan Crary, David Graeber, and Dave Hickey confab in the hall across from the far larger one commandeered by Harper’s. Was art better then, or was I twenty?

Someday soon, said Kissick in his most honest and insightful remark of the night, we’ll look back with longing on the early 2020s. The current moment, all three agreed, is not great. When an audience member asked what might break through the mediocrity of the present, the dabbling sedevacantist Nekrasova blurted out, “crucifixion and resurrection!” With no wine reception after the talk, we were going to have an awful hard time with that transubstantiation.