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In the wake of the art contemporary art markets’ most tumultuous year, critics and curators are scrambling to make sense of what’s left and comb through the wreckage to find morsels of legitimate art. What I suspect will happen is a much needed correction of the market to weed out the over-represented and unoriginal artists who have turned Chelsea into a graveyard.

The correction is inevitable but the question of who will make the cut remains a constant source of tension between the art market and the powers that be. Lately, I’ve found myself making lists - on notebooks, scraps of paper, napkins – with my predictions and every time I’m amazed at just how much art has been made in the last ten years and how much of it has been complete crap. But through it, there have been a number of legitimate movements that I’m confident will see it into the history books and in some cases already have; artists and artworks that are pushing art forward

Looking through my notes there are some keepers: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Olafur Eliasson, Urs Fischer; artists who have consistently been on the edge of what is new and relevant. But for every keeper a dozen I’m willing to discard, scratching out Greg Crewdson, Kehinde Wiley, and Beatriz Milhauzes. Movements too, tossing Stuckism and Superflat, Art for Networks and Poster-Pop, Pop Surrealism and Low Brow Art. But what’s left on the other end is dismal, aside from questionable neos and posts I’m left with only Relational Aesthetics before finding a Village Voice from a few years back when Jerry Saltz was still writing criticism.

The article, a review of Jon Kessler’s The Palace at 4AM, is headlined Clusterfuck Aesthetics which places Kessler’s bizarre installation at P.S.1 within the framework of an emerging movement which Saltz calls The New Cacophony and describes as “a manic-depressive panic attack in the face of information overload” which side from the dramatic phrasing sounds a little like Bourriaud’s definition of Relational Art. While the artists Saltz describes are by no-means relational what the two share is a common setting, a post-consumer world of communication that sits somewhere between utopia and apocalypse. While relational artists tend towards the optimistic, the artists of the new cacophony are a closer to destruction and while Relationalism is a rejection of male dominated, emotionally wrought, abstracted modernism the “clusterfucks” (to coin a half-baked term) almost all of whom are men embrace it.

Maybe because of Jerry Saltz’s questionable authority or uncomfortable popularity or maybe because of the venue he chose, The New Cacophony never left the pages of The Village Voice. Though in retrospective, perhaps it should have. What Saltz was onto could well have been the birth of another movement…that I could scratch out of my notepad of predictions.

Posted on December 29th, 2008 in The Theorist

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