Art about or responding to the COVID pandemic may simply be destined to be bad, but some things truly stand out. Caesura chimes in on the worst.

1.

Yoko Ono, Dream Together, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020

by Allison Hewitt Ward

Rather than draping the usual exhibition banners on its iconic facade for its September reopening, The Met commissioned two banners from Yoko Ono that read “DREAM TOGETHER.” It’s a nice message of unity and hope in trying times, and it can promptly fuck right off. This is coming from a museum that, in the form of layoffs, early retirements, and furloughs, has cut some 400 staff positions since March. I hope those people are having sweet dreams of banal corporate platitudes.

The Met and Ono are going hard on the “virus is the great equalizer” narrative. There is nothing equalizing about a pandemic economy that forces its lowest paid workers into hazardous conditions and renders millions unemployed, all while the Professional Managerial Class posts comfortably on Instagram about their #workfromhome problems and tweets furiously about the president’s lack of decency (I’d clutch my pearls if I had them). 

Ono’s accompanying statement only makes things worse:

The world is suffering terribly, but we are together, even if it can be hard to see at times, and our only way through this crisis will be together. Each one of us has the power to change the world. Remember love. 

Liberals may complain about right wing dog whistles, but oh boy do they have their own. The unavoidable subtext here is that “each one of us has the power to change the world” by voting for Biden. Together, in 2020 American English, is a form of weaponized doublespeak, a command to get in line behind the good guys (yes, the right does this too). 

The Creative Managerial Class has been tragically slow to learn just how bad this touchy feely “we’re all in this together” rhetoric makes them look. This piece is reminiscent of that cringey video of celebrities singing “Imagine” back in the early days of the pandemic. Wait… didn’t Ono know the guy who wrote that song?

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2. 

If you give a hack a headline: Kenneth Goldsmith

by Erin Hagood

This is the tale of Kenny G

Who loved to call things poetry

And how to escape History,

The golden schlong of Donny T,

And HRC, so motherly — 

He brained his own lobotomy.

Having first lobotomized himself trying (and failing) to read 60,000 pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails, Kenneth Goldsmith is now prepared to reveal to the ravenous public the true avatar of subjectless art, the ultimate in ego death. As Kepler stole the golden secret of the Egyptians and broke the six-thousand year blindness of God’s children, so Kenneth Goldsmith reached into the empty heart of 21st-century man and pulled from it the greatest piece of artwork for ten generations. 

How disappointed the public were to learn that it was just the cover of The Failing New York Times. 

In place of the artist’s will, Goldsmith has made an ego-ideal of the Democratic Party propaganda machine — or, the excrement of the ruling class. [1] Kent Johnson observed that Conceptual Poetry “replicates the cultural effluvia it poaches with little trace whatsoever, really, of any purposeful détournement.” Goldsmith offers a masterclass in this phenomenon. I’m sure Nancy Pelosi would have made Goldsmith’s tweet if she’d been sober enough to think of it first. Goldsmith’s mindless regurgitation of prevailing ideology is the conservative apotheosis of the seventh of Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art: “The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.”

But what is ego if not accumulated history gathered to a pinpoint and hidden away in a human mind? That it then reflects the crisis of that history should be unsurprising. Sol Lewitt was not the first to recognize this. The Surrealists, for example, attempted to subject the artist to critical self-reflection through his mechanization in automatic writing. Goldsmith’s Conceptual Poetry, however, throws its hands up in the face of crisis and surrenders to its managers. It renounces the prerogative of art to give expression to suffering and revels in every self-satisfied banality. And be assured, the NYT is above all satisfied with itself. Perhaps, Goldsmith has noticed that such expression is dangerous and has taken refuge in the long arms of Hillary Clinton, but must not the rest of us continue to live, and to live dangerously? 

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3. 

Banksy, Game Changer et al., 2020

by Gabriel Almeida

When Bansky’s Girl with a Balloon was voted Britain’s most loved artwork in 2015, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones reached out to Ruskin for his verdict, “People are stupid.” For him, art was always elusive, complex, and difficult; Bansky, crass and obvious. While one took as its basis the ambiguous relationship of human beings with the world around and inside them, the other happily reduced them to instant gratification. Art worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are, one might say. Has anything changed since?

Only that the self-promoting prankster is now the artworld’s darling. A slow acculturation has finally tuned critics’ voices to Bansky’s pitch. His two last “gestures,” a boy in overalls, playing with a mask-wearing NHS nurse action figure, and the recent Bansky-funded migrant rescue boat have sealed his fate. These will be forever celebrated, even as workers continue to tragically suffer and die, whether at sea and land, struggling for the lifebuoys of a dysfunctional capitalism. The British populace might be excused for its lack of “education,” but feel-good critics’ bad taste and posturing is beyond redemption.

The irony is missed on those artists who might fail to see these praises as anything but the culture industry’s wish fulfillment. They make clear that nothing is desired from them but a similar allegiance to the affaire du jour, meaningless though they actually are. Any quality is fine as long as it doesn’t affect its propaganda value; fundraising is an added bonus. As a Facebook commentator pithily put it, “Bansky is Joe Biden. Mystery Solved.”

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4. 

Andrew Cuomo’s “Self-Portrait of America,” April 29, 2020

by Madison Winston

Four months after Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled a large slab of plywood with hundreds of masks hastily stapled to it, several unanswered questions remain: Why was this made? Who made it, and were they paid? Were those masks ever used for their intended purpose? Who thought this would be a good idea? Was this assemblage arranged randomly, or did some amount of thought go into its composition? Why does America’s collective palette resemble that of a Goodwill store? As pressing as these inquiries may be, I am not an investigator. I am a critic, and I speak for the people: Cuomo’s “self-portrait of America” is an ugly abomination, albeit an accurate one. Like America, it is lumpy, denim-clad, and without a voice of its own.

Perhaps unlike the covid-related artworks made by fine artists like Yoko Ono, Banksy, and Damien Hirst, Cuomo’s gesture didn’t even try to hide the fact that the “self-portrait” was commissioned for his own political ends (imagine if Trump had done it instead!). This gimmick broadcasted the same message as all of Cuomo’s press conferences: “We are united in this fight against the virus, and with I as your leader, we will be victorious!” In this sense, the mask-portrait illustrates just how debased headline art always was: its social significance hovers somewhere between a readymade joke and an opinion that everyone already has. All of the art discussed above lives in this space: it benefits no one, not even the person who made it, and it signifies the opposite of what it claims. Hence, Cuomo stood in front of the object that some have described as a collage and proclaimed: “Do you know what it spells? It spells love.” //

[1]  It doesn’t take a genius, or a critic, to recognize that Goldsmith would not have hailed the NYT front page as poetry if Donald Trump weren’t president.