I suspect that the answer to your titular question is no, but then the arts are full up of people who have no real business being involved.
A vital first step is to discredit the extant system - not just to condemn the art it produces, but the fealty and conformism it demands. Bad art coming out of ACE support, for instance, should be disdained as "Arts Council art." Bad art put forth by the Tate should be condemned as "Tatist" or "typical of the Tatist style." I have taken to calling the general case as the art of the Monoculture.
Yes, agreed. I think the ACE stamp is already discrediting the art to which it is attached. That is already being absorbed by people, even subconsciously....
I do think that the victim culture will have to undergo a cataclysmic event of some sort in order to be replaced by something else. It's just too easy to be a victim. The whole of western culture is geared to this spiritual form like those spirits in Dante who follow one flag or another on a darkened plain hither and fro, this way and that.
I know a fellow who graduated from art school about 20 years ago. He's hetero (in fact now married with a kid) and from an upper middle class family. He made cool kid stuff – swirls of bio-morphic shapes with vaguely victim-like titles and even little cast figures from computer games. Living in New York, this whitest-kid-you've-ever-seen also recorded himself mimicking black hip-hop. Many, many times – publishing albums.
Within the last year or so he has taken down everything on his website, including, or especially, his blaxploitation dude recordings, or "drops". He's now moved to Vermont. He may still be painting, I'm not sure because I lost some contact with him.
I suspect he became alarmed by NYC meltdown and subsequent quality of life issues. He may be wondering about what sort of education his boy will get. As to the dude work I would think he's getting cultural appropriation blow-back or fears it. He may remember when the Dana Schutz painting of Emmett Till caused a lot of excitement at the Whitney, ending with a "Somali-Australian" making a painting of Schutz's young son (from a photo on social media).
From what I've heard from family sources, I don't think his political thinking has changed because in order to do so would require a spiritual revelation, a Paul on the road to Damascus moment. Instead, he just moved to a more congenial location. In other words, he's in limbo at the age of 40.
That is fascinating. I guess stories like that must be taking place everywhere and building up a pattern of a generation. Eventually even the political conformists will get cancelled and replaced due to quotas. Like those Communist "true believers" who were sent to the gulags, they'll be telling themselves it is a mistake and that as soon as it is sorted out, they'll be back in the good graces of the establishment.
Well, considering how terrible some of the recent public sculpture is and how badly it comes across to a normal or educated person, perhaps this is what some artists are already doing!
I suspect that the answer to your titular question is no, but then the arts are full up of people who have no real business being involved.
A vital first step is to discredit the extant system - not just to condemn the art it produces, but the fealty and conformism it demands. Bad art coming out of ACE support, for instance, should be disdained as "Arts Council art." Bad art put forth by the Tate should be condemned as "Tatist" or "typical of the Tatist style." I have taken to calling the general case as the art of the Monoculture.
https://dissidentmuse.substack.com/p/the-monoculture
More will be willing to flip when they've been made to feel that perhaps they're not sitting at the cool kid's table after all.
Yes, agreed. I think the ACE stamp is already discrediting the art to which it is attached. That is already being absorbed by people, even subconsciously....
I do think that the victim culture will have to undergo a cataclysmic event of some sort in order to be replaced by something else. It's just too easy to be a victim. The whole of western culture is geared to this spiritual form like those spirits in Dante who follow one flag or another on a darkened plain hither and fro, this way and that.
I know a fellow who graduated from art school about 20 years ago. He's hetero (in fact now married with a kid) and from an upper middle class family. He made cool kid stuff – swirls of bio-morphic shapes with vaguely victim-like titles and even little cast figures from computer games. Living in New York, this whitest-kid-you've-ever-seen also recorded himself mimicking black hip-hop. Many, many times – publishing albums.
Within the last year or so he has taken down everything on his website, including, or especially, his blaxploitation dude recordings, or "drops". He's now moved to Vermont. He may still be painting, I'm not sure because I lost some contact with him.
I suspect he became alarmed by NYC meltdown and subsequent quality of life issues. He may be wondering about what sort of education his boy will get. As to the dude work I would think he's getting cultural appropriation blow-back or fears it. He may remember when the Dana Schutz painting of Emmett Till caused a lot of excitement at the Whitney, ending with a "Somali-Australian" making a painting of Schutz's young son (from a photo on social media).
From what I've heard from family sources, I don't think his political thinking has changed because in order to do so would require a spiritual revelation, a Paul on the road to Damascus moment. Instead, he just moved to a more congenial location. In other words, he's in limbo at the age of 40.
That is fascinating. I guess stories like that must be taking place everywhere and building up a pattern of a generation. Eventually even the political conformists will get cancelled and replaced due to quotas. Like those Communist "true believers" who were sent to the gulags, they'll be telling themselves it is a mistake and that as soon as it is sorted out, they'll be back in the good graces of the establishment.
Thanks for the insight, Alex.
Well, considering how terrible some of the recent public sculpture is and how badly it comes across to a normal or educated person, perhaps this is what some artists are already doing!