Response to “Art in the Age of AI”
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.
Rothko's Asceticism
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.
Stan Douglas: "Doppelgänger" @ David Zwirner
The careless irony gives away the suffering narration involves in a world where it is no longer possible to tell stories.
Etel Adnan: "Planètes" @ Galerie Lelong
Adnan has begun to worry the surface; she abolishes the impenetrability of her color. She is dealing with fresh problems that she has created for herself. This is one definition of freedom.
Cultural Chastity
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.
Midsommar: The Lost Reflection
The return of “art” to film even if such gestures are mere semblance, may indicate, however obliquely, a renewed desire to reconsider the medium.
Eclipse of Postmodernism
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.
The Met at 150
For its entire modern history art was bound up in the possibility of freedom. So what happens when freedom no longer seems possible?
Gladys Nilsson: “New Work” @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Thus the Garden fades in darkness in the memory of mankind and yet lies behind every subsequent action as the enigmatic source of its power.
Art in the Age of AI
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.
Daniel Barenboim and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: Hommage à Boulez
The question is whether these works are self-critical in their own rebellion against established forms and their limitations, or whether they dogmatically adhered to Schoenbeg’s categories in their quest for the obliteration of the subject in service of musical free will.
Sound Art: A Historical Miscarriage?
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.
"A Revolutionary Impulse" @ MoMA
The fact is that the revolutionary impulse in art does not hew so cleanly to revolutionary politics.
Ambivalence
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 New Culture War?
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.
R.I.P. The Cultural Turn, C. 1968-2016
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.
Contradiction and Possibility
The veil has been lifted on the sensually expressed neoliberal ideals of being alright.
“Political” Art: A Failed Project
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?
Anne Imhof: Angst II @ Hamburger Bahnhof
And yet, the content and meaning of Angst II is excruciatingly difficult to define. The impulse to try to make the irrational moments — or the whole — meaningful is constantly frustrated.
Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room @ The New Museum
“The Waiting Room” is remarkable for its lack of concern with its institutional home and its disregard for questions of aesthetics.