RE: Dean Kissick, “The Painted Protest,” in Harper’s Magazine (December 2024)

Dean Kissick is a fine writer. What a lede. But for someone who stresses his education in art history, Kissick’s critique of the contemporary art world is dismayingly ahistorical. It depends, unavowedly, upon hundred-year-old modernist ideals, the virtue of which Kissick assumes rather than argues, and which other critics have subject to decades of brutal scrutiny.

Early in the essay, this dependence isn’t obvious, because Kissick summarily dismisses modernism’s “narrative of progress.” Shed of these shackles, Kissick then offers up his own criteria for what constitutes good art. “Variety,” “pluralis[m],” and “experimentation” all end up seeming like attractive alternatives to contemporary preoccupations with tradition and identity. The “new” looks even better. “New cultural forms,” “new experiences,” “new possibilities” — that’s where it’s at.

These values are familiar, even traditional. Kissick associates them with the years 1990-2010. But they are older. They are those of the modernists. Where are we going, M. Baudelaire? “To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!” the poet wrote in 1861. What should we do, Mr. Pound? Make It New, Pound titled his 1934 essay collection. We can say of Kissick’s ideas, as he says of the artworks in the Barbican’s Unravel exhibition, that they “might as well have dated from half a century ago, if not much earlier.” Kissick laments the contemporary art world’s “nostalgic turn to history,” but his own aesthetic criteria are no less old-fashioned. The unoriginality of these criteria is no proof of their paucity. But it is disappointing that Kissick, who can spot the Picasso behind Louis Fratino’s numbing — but queer! — pastiches in paint, cannot see himself as a pasticheur of ideas.

The modernist love for novelty and experimentation may seem universal; this love is really the derivative of a particular time and place. These are not the ideals of less frenetically evolving artistic cultures. They are not the ideals of the Qing dynasty, Ancient Rome, the Kwakwakaʼwakw of the Pacific Northwest, or (one suspects) the troglodytes of Lascaux. They are the artistic ideals of the West in the period of industrial capitalism’s ascendance. This fact, too, is no inherent proof against them. But if Kissick is to propound such standards, he should justify them, not presume their worth as uncritically as contemporary curators now presume the merit (or salability) of “identity and personal history.”

As it were, the spirit of modernism is still going strong. Only it is preserved today not by artists but corporations. Innovation, proliferation, diversification — if these are modernist values, if these are Kissick’s values, they’re also the values of Amazon, Apple, and Airbnb, which do well for themselves when, like the avant-gardists of prewar Europe, they conduct experiments, seek variety, and chase the new. “Guests can book new Experiences specially curated with Art Basel,” the Airbnb Newsroom recently beamed. “New possibilities for your favorite apps,” reads Apple’s webpage for its forthcoming AI feature. There it is: new experiences, new possibilities. The old modernist tenets have developed a homological relationship to contemporary economic imperatives. Small wonder such tenets cease to compel as the basis for an artistic program.

“Fratino’s paintings are something like a conscious break with the future,” Kissick writes. Exactly. The future of art is hard to envision, as hard to envision as a future free from capital’s mandate of infinite growth and transformation. So artists today, consciously or not, opt out of the strain of invention. They parrot, or lightly modulate, the past. We’ve been on this train a long time. As theorists of the postmodern have noted since that word came into vogue, the haphazard imitation of every past style is a hallmark of postwar artistic production. It’s also a hallmark of postwar aesthetic critique. We have seen, we will see, every visual style revived, every school reborn, every mode of interpretation and theorization resurrected. We will see Dean Kissick reprise modernist tropes.

But will we think and create in profoundly new ways? Kissick doesn’t really show us what a better future might look like. He does cite some contemporary works he likes. I, too, enjoy the music of Caterina Barbieri. But there is nothing novel about diatonic arpeggios. (The apparently futuristic quality of Barbieri’s music is a function of innovations in engineering — new sonic textures provided by new electronic instruments — but she has arrived at no properly musical discoveries.)

“Whoever says ‘new,’” the late Fredric Jameson wrote 35 years ago, “or deplores the loss of its concept in a postmodern age, also fatally raises the spectre of Revolution itself.” Perhaps innovation in the arts is more exciting, meaningful, and possible when it is not a veritable mandate in economic, technological, and social life. Perhaps what Kissick is seeking, unbeknownst to himself, is a sea change in these spheres, a change that may free artists to do something more interesting than center their identities or mimic their genuinely ambitious predecessors. I’m not so naïve as to expect such change soon. I’m also not a dogmatic Marxist, who thinks capitalism totally forecloses all new artistic forms, or that our imaginations are so swallowed by our economic conditions that they cannot think outside them, or that revolution is inevitable, etc. Or maybe I do think these things, with caveat after caveat. My point is just that Kissick may be mistaking the symptom for the disease. One might doubt whether the modernist dream can be revived through sheer will and polemic alone. As if our culture were solely a function of artists’ intentions, and not a function of the global art market, financialization, and a historically unprecedented supersaturation with information and images.