Critic’s Notebook
The pandemic has not only shut down museums and galleries. It has canceled an entire way of life for contemporary artists – and forces a reconsideration of what all that flying was good for.
“City in the Sky” ( , an installation by Elmgreen & Dragset at Art Basel Hong Kong.
(March) ,
While reproductions can never make art truly accessible, I’m glad to see efforts to expand digital offerings are also underway, in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Directors of museums in Italy’s hard-hit northwest, including the Pinacoteca di Brera
“ (Everything will be taken away) , ”forewarned the Berlin-based American artist Adrian Piper – who for years has repeated that aphorism, with the violent anonymity of the passive voice, on prints or mirrors or old -fashioned school blackboards. We are set to lose lives, careers, but also institutions, practices, traditions. Perhaps it’s best now, to reflect on what our present isolation teaches us about what art has become, and what we want it to look like when we re-emerge.
Contemporary art, In the last few decades, has morphed into a round-the-globe, round-the-clock industry, and just as disruptive as the closure of our local museums has been the locking down of borders and the grounding of flights. The Romantic cliché of the artist as genius, carving beauty out of marble, was replaced by the artist (and later the curator) as traveling entertainer, constantly on the road. Its paradigmatic images come from a Swiss duo, Fischli / Weiss, whose “Airport” photographs
What Fischli / Weiss captured in “Airports” was the way the art world assigns relevance through motion, and how even local institutions conceive of themselves as nodes in a global network of images and objects on the move. (Think of the new MoMA: once a temple where you’d reliably see the same Picassos on the same walls, now a place where artworks shuttle back and forth, and no room is the same for long.) As the critic Kyle Chayka brilliantly observed in Frieze magazine, art used to justify itself with stories of historical progress, whereas now it relies on “constant juxtaposition against new people and places,” perpetually en route to no destination in particular.
The rise of digital media did not arrest this globe-trotting but accelerated it. Now I can’t count the number of artists and writers I know who purported to be working from at least two places at once, “between Brussels and Los Angeles,” “between Berlin and Accra,” and who now have had hunker in place.
Their patron saint, and mine, too, is the narrator of (“Flights” ( ), (a chain of related fragments by the Nobel-winning author Olga Tokarczuk , who tells us: “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness – these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized.” For so many artists and critics and curators of my generation, your career has to fit in a carry-on.
We knew, as the climate crisis deepened, that this global art world constantly on the move was coming under necessary pressure. Now the prophylactic stasis demanded by this pandemic has violently accelerated the art world’s reassessment of what all this travel was good for.
The task of artists in this new plague year will be to reestablish painting, photography, performance and the rest as something that can still be charged with meaning, and still have global impact, even when we’re not in motion. Or at least that is the long-term mandate; the short-term task is to survive.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings