The Art World’s Grim Fate Online
By Tom Pazderka
I’ve been writing a lot during Covid, but not a whole lot about art. I wondered why since there was so much time to do a deep dive. Simply put, the art world experienced a demise unlike anything before. With over 50 percent of art workers out of work, cancelled and postponed shows, everything moving online into virtual spaces that hardly anybody cared for, myself included, in many ways, art died on the Ides of March. One wonders whether and how the art world will rebound. Is the art world dead or is it undead?
The news is that Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons are bankrupt. Even stalwarts of the scene like Robert Longo had his shows cancelled in the interim and had to temporarily suspend operations by either letting his studio assistants go or work from their homes. This is first-hand information from a friend of mine who works in Longo’s studio.
If things are so dire for the blue-chip artists, how is the rest of the art world faring? We will probably never know, because the art world is not known for its transparency, but rather for its glorified adherence to false positivity and hype in times of crisis. Anybody still remember Damien Hirst’s infamous auction when the world of finance was collapsing around him?
I want to review art shows, but there is nothing to review. I cannot count the hundreds of virtual exhibitions polluting the online commercial spaces no matter how sincere the intentions behind them. I know, I’ve participated in a few and I fully support the brave souls that tried, many of them are my friends and colleagues. But here are several reasons why I don’t believe that the move online was a good idea despite the flimsy evidence to the contrary.
1. Like many artists, I fully take part in the online world, despite my better judgement. I know my work is not commercial and that it requires prolonged viewing and exposure, yet I’m somehow convinced that perhaps it is just a matter of finding the ‘right’ audience. This is patently false. Artists do not find their audiences, they create them, at least in theory. The biggest lie about the online world is that there is seemingly an inexhaustible amount of people, art lovers, curators and collectors just waiting on hand and foot, millions of potential customers at the fingertips, a click or a tap away, and that it is somehow simply an artist’s refusal or negativity that’s preventing them from success. This is a favorite sales pitch of silver-tongued side-show barkers, committed to ferreting out dollars from unwitting artists looking for a break and they’re all over the internet and the Gram. One day I’ll have to write a whole essay on just the emails I get from these people.
2. In and of themselves, pictures online have no meaning, they’re flattened, without context. Instagramization of art reduces everything to the ubiquitous square, so that a four-inch drawing is unrecognizable from a twenty-foot painting. All traces of the human hand are erased, as is the lived experience. The scribbles of a barely teenaged child placed alongside an arts veteran of several decades, all meaning and difference lost between them. The fact is that quick recognizable images, witticisms and the reactionary meme-culture are what is considered worthy to call art today. This isn’t progress, but a regression into a culture of rote superstition run mostly on the fear of failure. Better do whatever is pop and topical, than risk obscurity for saying something.
3. Taking risks online is akin to getting into a car accident in a Costco parking lot. There’s going to be little damage, but a lot of yelling and finger pointing, and eventually all will be forgotten. Placing anything online, no matter how transgressive, will be ignored at best and coopted and used by some kind of opposition at worst. Sheppard Fairey could tell tales about that.
4. The individualized and privatized nature of online tribal culture, driven by sympathetic algorithms, means that what is generally seen, or allowed to be seen, is art that everyone already agrees with, so what is the point of writing about it if one is looking for critical theory? I am painting with a pretty broad brush here (pun intended), but the last thing I want to write about are mildly laudatory texts about some artist’s overcoming of adversity. It’s tired and clichéd and we have Hyperallergic doing most of this work, so why pile on? I’d much rather review album covers of Black Metal bands with questionable political leanings, if only to cut them down a notch or two.
5. Art writing, but also art itself, are at their best when they’re adversarial and pushing back against the tide of mass culture and popular belief. Unlike trolling, the point of adversarial art writing is to inform, elucidate, educate, reveal. There is hardly any revelation to be seen in the online culture that isn’t already an established form outside of it. How can art truly be changed by moving online if not for the worse? Pointing toward millions of views and likes only satisfies the modern obsession with metrics and arbitrary competition for no real visible gain other than money and fame. These things crush creativity in favor of shiny mediocrity and bold idiocy.
6. Once the safety of the insulated online world is established, the ‘dangers’ of an exit into the real world will be amplified.
7. We’ve quietly accepted the internet as our new normal, an augmented version of reality. But the online world is not ‘normal’ and it is not a ‘reality’ that should be accepted at face value. Immediately as the lockdowns began, we were told to accept and welcome our new normal. It is absurd and disheartening that such an attitude should take hold, let alone be widely accepted. Over half of the art world unemployed, shuttered, destroyed forever, should not be normalized. Neither should we normalize the increasing numbers of the homeless, who still work full time jobs for less than the minimum wage. Does anybody think that at the start of World War II there were writers and journalists exhorting “welcome to the new normal?”
8. Ironically, with its focus on immediate gratification and convenience, the online culture actually increases the invisible and unaccountable bureaucracy. Ignoring and being ignored is not only an accepted form of online coexistence, it is widely encouraged the further up one goes in the various hierarchical strata with algorithms specifically written to do just that. Since we are as a culture continually obliged and compelled to follow in the footsteps of the ruling class, the next move beyond the algorithms is therefore a logical step toward what Slavoj Zizek prescribes as a formal solution to the troubles with socialism in a post-Communist world, a future in which all services are more or less functioning at the state and local levels with our individual desires met, while we all go on politely ignoring each other. Building creative networks for art based on trust in these waters will truly be challenging.
