In the new art

In the new art, there should be some dangly elements or dangling things. Text elements are welcome, if not required, but should run to 75 words at most. Little bits of string, twine, or fishing wire. Conceptualism without populism, but demotic. There could be a petite sound box in the corner, like an old speaker or early digital headphones. It might be attached to a few other things like the text or the fishing wires, but could also be random. The randomness would not reference the Anthropocene (the climate crisis remains crucial, obviously). Strategies, canniness, are essential. You can get the joke; there can be jokes you can get. Maybe the epic mode could be transposed back into art; along with dingy-yet-stylish, scrappy-yet-chic installations embedding concepts, the new art might reawaken Eisenstein’s gambit in Mexico.

Moving-image work is indeed encouraged, but must not involve historical reenactment or citizen journalism. Rather, the new artists’ film and video trades signals for an unfamiliar aesthetics that is weird, sexy, and/or brainy; thought experiments that are not quirky. Art in the voice of a blowsy dame. No paintings unless they are really good and interrogate their own necessity, but lazily. A painting should be like a vodka-infused olive or an aged lemon curd. What if John Boskovich had grown old or Florine Stettheimer had taken a different path, gone to the ISP but hated it? While painting is discouraged (being a failure medium), I welcome oils on paper that incorporate gel and mica flakes; pom-poms; Courvoisier; tattoo flash … even extremely macho works will be somehow femme. If provincialism is necessary to ensure these ends, that’s fine or even good.

The new art should ask big questions lightly and wear the biographical on its sleeve; it is decorative yet impossible to collect. Rather than trade in Western or non-Western iconography, there will be no iconography: the new art at its best will explore the potentialities of such non-icons as have been as yet unidentified by semiologists (who shall not be named or cited in the press releases). Do not do R&D for the culture industry! But for yourself, yes. There could be some banjos involved. Or unitars. Absolutely no gimmicks, but explore the fertile space between charlatanism and sincerity (both genuine badness and virtuosity are too genuine). We need real solutions and policy proposals! Progenitors include Suhrawardi, Richard Dadd, Harry Smith, and Paige K.B.

Artwork can be distributed in “kits,” but not twee. No agitprop or feel-good, but yes political. Wordy artists should write or keep writing Highsmith-esque novel-length fiction and excel at other literary genres as well. At least one new artist should imagine the photos Luigi Mangione receives while in prison. Art should circulate by word of mouth. I hope an artist rides into a museum sculpture garden on the back of a toy pony singing the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the meaning of this action/event will not be determined by committee but by breathless inner reflection akin to that of one analyzing her own dreams. Does Ozempic have as yet unexploited psychotropic properties? I want at least some art that hallucinates yet is anti-romantic. Gallery as parfumerie. Earnestly, I long to see the ephemeral, the subtle, the weird and shattering back in action.

The post-studio thus needs to be reasserted yet also updated for the present, as with the case of the promising young artist who became a billionaire and is now working in a tower.

Art needs to become a bit analytical, thoughtful, and off-key. I am using lots of adjectives: let me be more specific. Analysis might decompose everyday gestures and make them into something new, or instead of gestures could take up grammars, habits, protocols (incl. digital), naremes, and boyish adventures. A certain return of intrigue and confusion is welcome, desired.