The National Cowboy Museum’s Twitter feed in the hands of Director of Security Tim Tiller is the kind of voice we crave during the COVID-19 lockdown. Tim’s sincere charm cuts through the digital cacophony and has earned the Museum three hundred thousand plus Twitter followers and global platform. But more importantly, it’s the voice we’ve needed from art museums for a long time.

Postmodernism can be characterized as a reaction to the negativity of modern art; it sees the violent separation of art and life and would like nothing more than to mend the wound that forced them apart.

The nonbinding translations of today, those which attain a specious success (those we are too afraid to judge as bad — bad as translations, as poems) will not be forgiven. When they nestle into the dust of the archive, it will be as well-intentioned messages that exhaust themselves in what they say, not as artworks that continue to unfold in time.

Intellectualism sees institutions as trash islands damming up the river of life where cesspools fester, and wonders why humans don't instead amplify or store the energy of the river for the greater expanse of life. The academic is content to sniff the trash. Trash humping is an academic exercise.

“Kant was not a philosopher of art, but of freedom. Of what we could know, but do not yet know — and how even our instincts push us towards developing our faculties beyond them.” —Florian Walch

What these three modes of aesthetic artifice/art/artistry have in common is an ugly obsession with purity. This makes Schneider’s analogy about religion and art especially worth investigation.

I wanted to approach the paintings and be absorbed in their depth, but they refused me, turning away from my senses. This was a new force, an ascetic ideal that fixed my place in an obdurate world.

Let's not be chaste! Critics should strive for immanent dialectical critique, which has itself become desecrated. I can only imagine how many status quo readers will comment here that it’s not ‘relevant’ anymore; as in relevant to the status quo and conformed taste. And that is exactly the point.

And what do we make of the issue that our frustration is with realizing the futility of any radical gesture? That’s the problem of postmodernism in a nutshell.

For its entire modern history art was bound up in the possibility of freedom. So what happens when freedom no longer seems possible?

The ethos of artistic representation undergoes revision as it intermingles with a new enlightenment spirit in what is broadly perceived as the age of AI.

There are periodic flares of interest in sound art, from top ten lists to comprehensive sound art exhibitions, and yet no one is really certain what this term means, and what the whole thing is about.

Man must care about art because it is a practice in which he can both critique his ambivalence and envision a world without it.

The art world fails to see the election of Trump as anything more than terrifying repetition (albeit on steroids) of the Culture Wars. This points to an exhaustion of ideas.

If there's a reintroduction of politics (and not pseudo-political culture) in 2016 — something many of us have not seen in our lifetime — there will be a dramatic change in the way art is made in the coming years.

The veil has been lifted on the sensually expressed neoliberal ideals of being alright.

Are we to accept that the field of artistic production — unique in its capacity to butt up against the world as it is and imagine a world as it should be — offers only an endorsement for a political stalwart?

What role can criticism possibly play in completing works of art, or “fulfilling” them?

Modern criticism developed when art became serious and demanded thought. Yet the vast majority of our culture today isn't meant to be seriously thought about.

The new phenomenon of artists and critics eagerly hatching their careers, quickly cobbling together movements for their resumes, and planning for their retrospectives before they have anything to say, may sound vulgarly affirmative to those reared in the ‘60s communes or the ‘70s DIY subcultures.