La Combi Versace for December 3rd
Se me ve el culo en Versace...
Oh, hello, there—
TW: Art writing. (Sorry).
I’ve spent the last week in Miami for Art Basel, the gargantuan art fair. The publication I work for flew me out and put me up, complete with a Mac laptop that’s way nicer than the one I own. I spent the majority of my time in a windowless conference room right above the convention center, writing articles about work I didn’t see and events I didn’t attend. I did visit the fair, though. There were some good paintings on view. The venue was pleasantly cold. I couldn’t summon much in the way of enthusiasm, but was surprised at my otherwise bloodless response. A friend quipped via Instagram dm, “try not to kill any billionaires”. Weirdly, I didn’t feel the urge. I just wanted to go home.
In 2022, disillusionment with the commercial machinations of the art world feels naive at best, posturing at worst. The history of art patronage is indistinguishable from the history of state propaganda, of theocratic expansion, of white supremacy in all its myriad iterations. The artists that inspired me to fall in love with painting as a kid weren't just ethically dodgy private citizens (insert boring “can bad men make stuff” discourse here), but cultural producers that fine-tuned a semiotics of economic verticality at their overlords’ behests.
Rapist? court painter? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
At this point, everyone knows that even highly romanticized movements like Abstract Expressionism functioned first and foremost as a CIA psy-ops, mainstreaming the cult of masculine creative genius as an anti-Red free market accelerant. The most authentic manifestation of visual art in current imagination, then, takes the shape of an academically glorified oligarchical outpost, which, of course, is exactly what the fuck it is.
While in Miami, I learned that the fine art storage business has exploded by a 500% margin over the last decade, a particularly notable phenomenon in light of how art sales tend to interact with global economic trends. While art isn't necessarily a recession-proof investment, it is a hard luxury, an appreciating asset with the potential to accrue enormous value over time.
In 2008, the art market spiked at the same time thousands of Americans were losing their homes and livelihoods—the 1% were divesting from the stock market, banks, and real estate en masse to buy art objects they had no intention of displaying, hiding them in tax-exempt, sovereignty-neutral freeports until it proved financially viable to flip them for cash. Art storage facilities don't require their VIP clients to declare or inventory the contents of these climate controlled crates, either, which means that stolen, looted, or plundered work can circulate undisturbed by Interpol. This is jet-setting power consolidation at its most brazen. This is how the filthy rich stay rich. (For reference, Basel's primary sponsor is a literal Swiss bank).
Anna Khachiyan, (who is now a crypto -fascist anti-vaxxer, unfortunately), wrote a smart, smug post for SFMoMA’s blog in 2016, “Art Can't Save Us”, directed at performative LibDem art world outcry in the wake of Trump’s rise to power. Her thesis was simple—objects that interact with the deregulated commodities market cannot, by definition, enact or catalyze social change.
I’d take it a step further. Art isn't political—politicized, sure, but not political. It never could be.
The institutional push worldwide to foreground DEI initiatives following the BLM protests of 2020 only amplifies my belief in the impossibility of artistic subversion; mass identity commodification in cultural heritage has banished protest to the realms of institutional critique and brand optics; lord knows the Black and brown security guards at most museums still don't have anything remotely resembling health insurance. When Hyperallergic runs a piece titled “Why Is There No Spanish at Art Basel Miami?”, the author misses the point. Equity is not achieved through increased access at art fairs, equity is achieved by abolishing them entirely—events this bloated shouldn't exist and don't need to, in the same way the blue chip gallery system itself operates as a nostalgic money-laundering scheme masquerading as prestige retail.
Plus, it's an open secret that most MFA-farmed artists congregating in major coastal cities aren't only unabashed agents of gentrification (me included), but fonts of unchecked Libertarianism. They come by this ideology, or lack thereof, quite honestly —the original Bohemians of 19th century France had little in the way of a centralized party-line. They just wanted to write bad novels and give each other consumption.
There is no theater of the oppressed under late capitalism, sure, but even bringing that up seems hack, simplistic, well-trod. I don’t require seamless morality of the aesthetics I consume because I’m not a Fascist, sure, but I don’t pretend to be some unassailable ethical authority, either. I’m just a guy, and flexing my own misplaced bitterness as content isn’t as woke as we’d all like it to be, I don’t think.
All told, the most radical position anyone can assume in the art world today is one defined by refusal, total absence if you can stand it. I can't stand it, at least not yet, although maybe that's a sunk-cost-fallacy problem. I’m finally seeing some traction, such as it is, both in my writing and painting “careers”, such as they are. Would it make me a self-sabotaging purist to turn that ship around?
The thing is, I’m not a purist, not in the slightest. I wasn't disappointed in Basel Miami because I expected magic and found a meat factory instead, but for a far more personally indicting and problematic reason. Art Basel in Miami Beach sucked not because it's carbon footprint was cartoonishly indefensible or because the art was ugly or because management didn't give a shit about COVID or because extreme wealth does little for the spatial relations or manners of men in Fendi pants, but because the fair was…uncool.
Tacky in a tired way, like a Live Laugh Love pillow in a bible belt Mcmansion. The music at the parties was cheesy, the clothes were stuck in 2014, the work was uniformly unexciting even in the negative, and the clientele seemed anxious and exhausted; crowds never grew thick enough to properly transform the space from convention center into landmark cultural event.
Please don't misunderstand me—this isn't just a pretentious east-coasters blanket dismissal of gentrified Miami Beach. Miami Beach is trashy, not tacky, and trash ontology provides fecund soil for creative expression. If “good taste” constitutes the assimilationist fiction of aspirational whiteness, trashiness posits an alternative modality of survival, loud, brash joy, an unruly aesthetic undercommons never wholly captured by mainstream appropriation. Tackiness belies shortcoming, an attempt thwarted by ignorance or purposive disinterest. Tackiness tries, which makes its failure abject.
So, what happens when art isn't cool anymore, when it can't even pretend to maintain its own countercultural cache? Sarah Douglass at ArtNews recently wrote that the “art world has become Miamified”, noting that despite the “profoundly shallow” nature of Basel, she couldn’t wait to go. Like Douglass, I’m not interested in weaponizing my snobbiness as a means of establishing some fungibly ironic opinion. Miami Beach’s brash opulence should feel fun, and as the museum sector leans harder into immersive “edutainment” programming, private collections and commerce models are following suit. And why shouldn’t art ownership feel like a party? If cheugy tech guys and cheesy mobsters are buying, why not cater to their needs? Believe me, I have zero beef with vapidity. My issue lies with Douglass’ assertion—I don’t actually agree. The art world craves Miamification, but as we teeter on the brink of crushing recession, buyers aren’t sold on the bacchanal.
Instead, the art world is headed towards populism. That’s way, way worse than emptiness.
This embarrassing installation by Patrick Martinez proves my point. It’s not dumb because it dilutes Jenny Holzer’s legacy, or because it’s explicitly Instagrammable, or because it participates in the threadbare fantasy that anyone who can afford to drop $75k on a neon sign votes Democrat, but because the work is fundamentally unambitious. At least Banksy’s or Hirst’s gimmicks might elicit a weary sigh once in a while. This piece just feels like an afterthought, or a memory of something fresher, reconstituting obsolete revolutionary signifiers as clout points for the philanthropic class with a dearth of relish that would even make KAWS roll his eyes. I keep coming back to nostalgia, here, largely because nostalgia is so closely tied to vanity and its cousin, denial. Martinez is pandering with such intensity that there’s nothing to look at anymore.
Still, the fact that the artist is a man of color from humble beginnings imbues the work’s insult with a sort of poignance, if not hypocrisy—dude doesn’t come from generational wealth like his buyers do. He’s just trying to pay for a nice house, maybe put something aside for his family. Why should I demand social import of this guy? Is that my privilege talking, again? My own nostalgic vanity?
The only piece with balls enough to embody actual tawdriness at this year’s fair was Brooklyn collective MSCHF’s semi-viral “ATM leaderboard”, a working ATM that displays the bank balance of the user next to a picture of his, her, or their face. It’s redundant, indulgent, and grifty, but at least it achieves a Koonsian capaciousness of meaning, however useless. Collectors get to flex, journalists get to groan, artists get to mourn the decline of the sector to which they swore fealty at 18, and tiresome white women get to rant about it noncommittally via Substack.
So if art's not cool, or beautiful, or disruptive, what is it good for apart from evading taxes? In his book Underrepresentation, philosopher David Lloyd talks about the “antinomy of aesthetics”, an inherent contradiction in their post-Enlightenment ethos. According to Lloyd, representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: racialized subjects remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is to overlook its continuing force in the formation of identarian modernity. I would argue that the current market pendulum swing back towards abstraction operates both as a reaction to figural glut in the collecting sphere and a Culture War fatigue response. Money talks. Politics don’t. If we agree that the heritage sector must now keep pace with private equity and not the other way around, this bodes very, very badly for marginalized artists attempting to make career or community headway. Tokenized by the relevance that hinges on their disposability, Black, brown, queer, disabled, and otherwise “subaltern” artists find themselves barred from radicality by virtue of their market participation, participation they must court in order to survive.
Yesterday, e-flux ran a piece by Jakub Gawkowski criticizing Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, which, since the arrival of director Pietr Bernatowicz, has become a curatorial mouthpiece for the Poland’s populist Law and Justice party. Not only is Bernatowicz dedicated to turning contemporary art into a safe haven for nationalist values (the Center has recently shown and acquired anti-Black works by Swedish performance artist Dan Park and anti-queer works, in neon no less, by Polish artist Jacek Adama), but the institution is partnering with established “Western” art voices like Los Angeles-based German curator Aaron Moulton to stage exhibitions that walk and talk like art shows, but operate as conspiracy theory incubators. Bernatowicz’s latest endeavor “interrogates” the role of George Soros in the landscape of post-Soviet Eastern Europe (oh my god), a thesis about as antisemitic as they come. Art may not be political, but it can sure can be leveraged as soft power by those with their fingers on the pulse of culture.
In my opinion (which no one asked for, to be fair) the rampant neoliberalism endemic to the commodities sector will continue to aid and abet Fascist malfeasance as the economy implodes, and Basel Miami provided a sneak peak into that dark, peculiar future. “A system that is neither private nor public allows autonomy and flexibility for the ruling class” wrote Nizan Shaked in her book Museums and Wealth. Shit’s about to get ugly, I think. It already is.
ABMB was my second art fair in 2022. For my first, the indie, artist-run event Spring Break, I wasn’t present in my capacity as a journalist, but as a painter, selling my drawings to whomever might take them. I hated the presumption that I would suck up to idiots in Chanel shoes, or abide willful misunderstanding by well-meaning visitors who wouldn’t read the fucking wall text.
I didn’t sell anything. I wanted to. As for everything else, I’m not certain what I want anymore.
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Love,
-Baubo