If life was once about chasing after a dream, it’s now about running away from the comfortable, hypnagogic lifestyles prescribed to you by the culture we create together, reflexively and imitatively. You’re living inside other people’s dreams; and these are not good dreams. So much of modern life is algorithmically scripted so as to exclude surprise or chance, and you must try to break free of this script every day. Rejecting all this post-death culture is a good place to begin. It’s New Year’s Eve —

 https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/downward-spiral-popular-things-dean-kissick

 

 

So pleasantly soft and relaxing. A museum of what critic Rob Horning has described as culture without friction: “‘readable books’; ‘listenable music’; ‘vibes’; ‘ambience’ etc.”

 

 "The Turner Prize shortlist suggests a contempt for art and for artists that most of us can well sympathize with, nevertheless I do think its jurors have a responsibility to find good artists and advocate for them, or, if they really insist, to find good socially engaged collectives and advocate for those. However, if only socially engaged collectives are nominated, each of them is belittled, undermined and reduced to a supporting role in a publicity stunt by the jury: You’re not here because of what you do for your community, you’re here because of what you represent for us. Like much else today it’s both patronizing and unbearably literal. This is the new world of floating signs and symbols, where everything must become a token: in the fair, hazy paintings are traded as stores of wealth, while on the blockchain, images become speculative derivatives and financial instruments, while in the art prize, diverse community groups are tokenized as fungible window dressing for public institutions that are laying off their staff. As Black Obsidian Sound System commented after their nomination, “We understand that we are being instrumentalised in this moment.”

 

It’s a funny world in which the most expensive artist under 66 isn’t really an artist, the most expensive painting in history is missing, will never be seen again, and the most influential art prize is no longer awarded to artists. Welcome to the dystopian present. In Singapore, MetaKovan (Vignesh Sundaresan) is building a museum in the metaverse, with Beeple’s 5,000 Days as his Michelangelo’s David; in the high-rise enclave of Hudson Yards, in The Shed, the $500 million white elephant with the moving roof that never moves, that cannot be moved (something to do with needing costly sailors to come and rig the curtains), facing the Heatherwick honeycomb which has been closed to the public because people keep jumping off it to their deaths, by the bankrupt Neiman Marcus, under the Equinox Hotel with the giant wireframe sculpture of a person with a hole in their head, the shimmering monumental psychogeographic sunset-facing lobotomy, is a calm, mindful fair where all is mellow; in Coventry, where the Turner Prize has gone to bring art to the reaches, five different socially engaged collectives will be judged against one another, by a cheery bunch of museum directors and actor/ collectors, to see which is best; a nightmare vision of the postmodern welfare state.

These different art worlds are so far away from one another, but are joined by their lack of variety. When I first started to go to Frieze in London it was a bustling, cacophonous variety show packed with different approaches, ambitious gallery stands, architectural interventions, weird projects winding in and out of the fair, bars and restaurants everywhere, and a circus of freaks, interlopers and celebrities clamouring for attention. Regent’s Park was where I had my education, where I went to learn about contemporary art and the gallery scene, and to see what was being made around the world and who the important and the up-and-coming artists were. At the end of each day they’d play applause over the intercom, applause for all the money they’d made and how, and gallerists would lean back in their replica Eames chairs with a flute of Ruinart and light up, weed smoke rising up into the tents. Today though it’s more like a smart weapon, or a duty-free, a targeted, purified space of highly refined middlebrow taste designed to sell a certain kind of painting to a certain kind of person, and nothing more.

 

The same’s true of the Turner Prize shortlist. It’s crafted to appeal to a certain sort of person: not to an art-loving public, or West Midlands schoolchildren who might have dreams of escaping their hometown and creating an immortal masterpiece, by which they might transcend this Earthly realm and echo through time, but to fellow professionals wanting to feel good about themselves

 

https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/downward-spiral-art-party-carousel 

 

DEAN KISSICK is Spike’s New York Editor. The Downward Spiral is published online every second Wednesday a month. Last time he wrote about Return to Tradition.