9/13/2023 0 Comments Crazy spiral art![]() Nobody but Netflix executives know the viewing figures, so nobody can see the lies. ![]() What this is, is a failure to manufacture demand.” One of the biggest tools they have is exploiting social pressure by creating the illusion that everyone is watching x “The Cowboy Bebop thing is pretty funny,” one person noted, “but it really exposes how much Netflix just doesn’t make any fucking sense … a few weeks ago they were tweeting about how it basically was setting the data centers ablaze, now it’s cancelled.” Another, the “Marquis de Posade,” elaborated, “The contemporary economy is about manufacturing demand, and Netflix literally owns their own platform to do so. Last Christmas, shortly before Netflix began to fall apart, they cancelled their live-action remake of the Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop. At the top of the market and in the biggest shows there’s not much very good, and not much very bad, which is a shame, because really bad art can be captivating, thrilling, fun to look at, can lead to great breakthroughs, but sweet tasteful kitsch leads nowhere fast. Most of these new painting superstars are very, extremely, ultra “mid.” I mentioned one of the market star painters of Venice to my neighbor at a dinner and he just kept saying “gar-bage, gar-bage … gar-bage,” pronouncing the second syllable so that it rhymed with “Raj.” I probably started talking about how her paintings were just very mid. What’s so hot right now is inoffensive, middle of the road, pleasant on the eye, mediocre. What’s in right now is kitsch and schlock and camp and, yes, a little soft porn. This summer the trend is for paintings made by and, or, featuring, attractive young women, which makes sense, because Instagram is, at heart, about images of attractive young women as has been much of the history of art. All art has become a sort of post-internet art, experienced through screens. Many of them are working off Instagram, and the PDFs and previews that every gallery sends out, and art is now being viewed, curated, collected, and traded through online images, much more so than in person, and this process has only accelerated over the past couple years indoors. The market, Farago observes, is controlled by speculators and value is accrued through speculation rather than museum shows, catalogues, and critical support as before. This represents the triumph of what I and others have previously described as “zombie figuration,” now joined by a second wave of zombie formalism, and brought together under the meaningless temporal “ultra-contemporary.” In the timeless dissociative fugue of the present, biennials of contemporary art fill with dead artists while auction houses hammer through zombie remakes of artists still very much alive and well.Įvery asset but bad painting is collapsing! You have to buy what you can and when it’s worth too much more have to sell it again. Christina Quarles’s curiously sexless orgy scene Night Fell Upon Us (2019) also went for $4,527,000 at Sotheby’s. ![]() Writing about last month’s auctions in the New York Times, Jason Farago addressed how the market has accelerated into speculative overdrive: with Ewa Juszkiewicz’s copy of a 19th-century French genre painting, Portrait of a Lady (After Louis-Léopold Boilly), going for $1.56 million, Flora Yukhnovich’s lifeless gestural remake of François Boucher’s Triumph of Venus (1740) going for $630,000, a pair of Anna Weyant’s Chinese Cynical Realist John Currin–like portraits going for well over a million each, and one of Lauren Quin’s cool Kerstin Brätsch–esque abstractions making $529,000. “Ultra-contemporary” because it doesn’t do anything new, but only refines already-present historical and contemporary art into exceedingly sellable and tasteful styles. Now there’s kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.” Much of the art that makes up today’s booming “ultra-contemporary” market is kitsch it’s an emptied-out, backward-looking remake of styles from the past, often the very recent past. “Before pop art,” Don DeLillo once said, “there was such a thing as bad taste. And today it’s so hard to tell the difference, and the boundaries between good and bad have disappeared. ![]() Some years ago, I went out with some friends to Trisha’s, a basement bar in Soho in London, and after a few drinks a stylist, quite austere, softly spoken, leant over to me and asked quietly, “Do all the bad designers, know that they’re bad?” That’s a question I’ve often wondered myself. ![]()
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