The last pre-covid exhibition at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in downtown New York was titled Paint-It-Yourself. The exhibit, showing new work by Merlin Carpenter, consisted of ten large, blank canvases and a box of paints in the center. During the opening, the crowd took up the paints and made childish paintings of stupid, ironic jokes: a scrawled “BANKS ARE COOL,” dollar signs, a vomiting head, an alien head, a crude rainbow, text written by one person and crossed out by another, etc. If I rolled my eyes at Paint-It-Yourself in 2020, in retrospect I can see it as a mildly brilliant exercise in art-scene recursiveness. The paintings were made by the audience and for that same audience, expressing the id of a social scene, the idiotic glee of a specific time and place.
If nothing else, my estimation of Paint-It-Yourself has improved because I look back fondly at what I once took for granted. The downtown art scene may have already been past its peak, but the neighborhood was better before a million articles turned it into “Dimes Square,” just as Dimes Square would be better than the TikTok influencers who would invade just a few years later. Reena Spaulings is still there, and I still associate the downtown scene with much of the most exciting and challenging art being made today. But the increasingly hollow imitations of culture in the neighborhood are indicative of the larger threat that the internet poses to the in-person communities that have always sustained artistic scenes, in part by developing their own at least semi-autonomous criteria for what counts as “cool” within them. When the art market can get by with flashy and ineffectual figurative paintings that are easy to sell on Instagram, it no longer has any reason to care about what’s going on in artistic subcultures. Indeed, those subcultures no longer have any reason to care about themselves. This isn’t to say, however, that the internet alone made art uncool. Not at all.
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I sometimes half-joke that the art world died in 2003. In that account, the two signal events from that year are the death of the art dealer Colin de Land and Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a video work that consists of footage of the artist having sex with a collector who had agreed to buy an edition of the work beforehand. To my knowledge neither had a tangible effect on the art world at large beyond New York, but both represented an inflection point for the late-avant-garde framework that had sustained that world since the early Nineties.
De Land was a late, DIY version of Leo Castelli, someone whose respected position and informal panache—holding art fairs in the rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel, teaching art history to prospective collectors, wearing a modified trucker hat that read “Don’t bother me unless you’re buyin’”—allowed him to mediate between radical, uncommercial artists and an active collector base. His death marked the end of the “gentleman dealer.” Versions of this model have been tried in the decades since, but American Fine Arts, Co., along with his wife Pat Hearn’s eponymous gallery (both died of cancer while still in their forties; Hearn died in 2000), still stand as the high points of the time when the most exciting new artists—Tishan Hsu, ART CLUB2000, John Knight, Jutta Koether, Christian Philipp Müller, as well as Andrea Fraser—were being shown by the coolest gallerists. No one would confuse de Land with a mainstream market titan like Larry Gagosian, but nevertheless the tradition of the cool New York gallery has never improved upon his model.
Andrea Fraser more nearly documents the last moments of the avant-garde from the perspective of the artist. Leading up to the provocations of Untitled, her practice in the late 1980s and 1990s consisted of rigorously anti-aesthetic critical interventions, prominently in the form of video performances that parodied the art world’s conceits and pretensions—scrupulously adopting and exaggerating the affect of an affluent, self-possessed museum guide in Museum Highlights (1989) and Welcome to the Wadsworth (1991), acting as a culture reporter in Reporting from São Paulo, I’m from the United States (1998), or cycling through impersonations of a range of art-world personality types in a mock reception speech (while stripping down to her underwear) in Official Welcome (2001). Her farcical reproductions of the social edifices of the art world worked in part because of their near-slapstick humor but also through exhibitionistic self-implication: portraying the ego that comes from success and validation along with the shame of critiquing a system that then rewards one for their critiques. This mounting tension between the institutional critic who scorns the art world and the artist who wants fame and attention couldn’t sustain itself indefinitely, however, and Untitled marks the point where Fraser’s self-critique reached its limit and turned in on itself.
It’s easy enough to say that there is an allegorical message in Fraser’s performance—selling art is “selling yourself”—but there is no self-criticism embedded in it. While taking her exhibitionism to an extreme, what really distinguished the video was the way it foreclosed the possibility of any critical or ambiguous distance between the artwork and its sale. Fraser made a sex tape with a buyer, and an edition of the work was sold; the work amounts to an unusually frank admission that she had sold out. Of her generation, Fraser was perhaps the most totally committed to the avant-garde tradition of the autonomous, critical artist. By dramatizing her capitulation to the logic of the art market, she signaled the impossibility of institutional critique at the turn of the century.
By avant-garde, I mean art movements that rejected traditional media and sought to work in an expanded field that went beyond the physical object, beginning with Dadaism and Russian Constructivism in the 1910s. This lineage, which took hold most consequentially with the rise of the more conceptual schools of art in the 1960s, concerns itself with a reflexive examination of the conditions of art and thus seeks to expand or revolutionize those conditions: very roughly, minimalism deals with the space around art, conceptualism with the dimension of thought in art, and institutional critique with the systems of the art world itself. What was crucial in these developments was the underlying utopian teleology, a post-Hegelian faith that radical, critical art would bring about a corresponding change in society, whether by decommodifying art, abolishing the separation between art and life or inciting political revolution.
This belief in inevitable historical progress ran aground in two ways during the final third of the twentieth century. Culturally speaking, it was a victim of its own success. Even by the 1980s, the figure of the radical artist who stood at odds with society had become so compulsory, and the countercultural inheritance of the Sixties had so dissipated the conventional strictures of mass society, that resistance and novelty had become a de-rigueur and indeed normative position in art and culture. Eventually, the figure of the innovative avant-garde artist transformed from the rebellious outsider living in a garret to the ambitious startup founder who “disrupts” the market to establish their brand. In short, épater les bourgeois took on an entirely different and more ineffectual meaning as soon as the respectable classes decided they wanted art to shock them. Politically, meanwhile, the end-of-history Nineties were a death knell for the idea that the avant-garde was poised to create a new society, as the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the seeming triumph of global capitalism effectively reduced leftism to an eccentric side project of liberal internationalism.
Within the artistic avant-garde, the full effect of these developments would take hold slowly (and in some places, not at all). But one symptom of them, at least, could be seen in the narrowing of concern of the avant-garde to the institutions that were specifically associated with art. Avant-garde critique, at least in Fraser’s late iteration, stakes itself on an either/or: art is either hostile to the institutions that show, promote and sell art, or it is complicit with them.
Because Fraser herself could not resolve this dilemma in her practice, she was left with an either/or of her own: either make peace with the institution or give up on art. She evidently chose the former (she’s still a working artist), and her art since Untitled has moved decisively away from critiquing the art world, instead gravitating toward reenactments of psychoanalytic or political conversations, such as a “group relations” session or a radio broadcast of a discussion between feminist men. Yet shorn of their humor and self-critical edge, the performances have become toothless and arbitrary; there’s little gained by her one-woman restagings of these interactions, except for the proof of her virtuosic abilities as a mimic. Perhaps after Untitled she decided the only way for her to remain an artist was by taking refuge in extra-artistic interests, to come to terms with the institution of art by giving up on the importance of art as such.
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Fraser’s compromise was indicative of a larger crisis in the art world at the turn of the 21st century. The year after Fraser produced Untitled, four editors of the influential art journal October released an art-history textbook titled Art Since 1900. Founded in 1976 to give voice to the emerging theoretical discourse around postmodern art, October had been influenced by the then-new strains of French poststructuralist philosophy, along with psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, phenomenology, semiotics and so on. Crucially, the journal’s writers rejected traditional categories of aesthetic judgment, due at least in part to their antipathy toward the previous generation’s preeminent art critic, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg himself had been the champion of Abstract Expressionism, postwar America’s primary avant-garde movement through the 1950s, but his conception of artistic judgment had remained grounded in visual notions of formal harmony and aesthetic autonomy. This led him to reject later avant-garde movements that increasingly sought to break with those values through the Sixties and Seventies, like Pop Art, minimalism, land art and conceptualism, as well as their precursors, such as Dadaism and Surrealism. These were the very movements that October aimed to validate as an anti-aesthetic counter-canon, in part by dismissing judgment as bourgeois or otherwise hopelessly outdated and instead turning to theory for the valorizing terms of their criticism. By the time of the textbook’s publication in 2004, however, the once-insurgent critical language of the October editors had become the de facto institutional language of the art world—a shift that changed late-avant-garde artists such as Fraser from adversaries of the art system into its representatives.
Fraser described this dynamic in 2005:
It is artists—as much as museums or the market—who, in their very efforts to escape the institution of art, have driven its expansion. With each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, to redefine art or reintegrate it into everyday life, to reach “everyday” people and work in the “real” world, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it.
This process of incorporation comes for every avant-gardism; what Dadaists and minimalists declared as new forms of art eventually became the established aesthetic categories for the next generation of artists. October’s rhetoric, and thus the theoretical framing of the work of an artist like Fraser, was dependent on the continuation of this narrative of the autonomous vanguard. Certain groups of radical artists were able to keep up this recursive process through the 1990s, but Art Since 1900 and Untitled both signaled that, by 2004, the “critical” and “autonomous” artist had become—for the artist and the art institutions alike—mostly a useful fiction.
There have continued to be developments in art since 2004, of course. But anyone who follows them closely will recognize that the institutionalization of criticality characterizes most of the major trends in art over the last twenty years, particularly in institutions like contemporary art museums and the international art biennials. The totalizing wave of identity-political, “care”-political, climate-political or anything-as-long-as-it’s-political art that dominates the institutional art-biennial circuit is supported by a post-conceptual skeleton of critique inherited from October, in most if not all cases utilized to repeat formerly vanguard practices or launder formerly proscribed, now-conventional art practices with tacked-on social narratives. (Among other things, this has led to an extreme reliance on wall texts to dictate an artwork’s importance: a bowl on the ground can explore climate change because it was produced in a country where rising sea levels are a problem, or it could be significant to the artist because it reminds them of their grandmother. It’s impossible for the viewer to glean such symbolism without reading a textual supplement.) In a particularly ironic turn, the 2026 Whitney Biennial employed “mood” as the latest buzzword in the institutional repertoire of overextended postcritical rhetoric. The term comes from an 1899 paper by art historian Alois Riegl but, as far as I can tell, it’s simply being used to smuggle in the aesthetic surfaces that October’s entire project sought to disqualify. This means that institutions have finally found their way back to aestheticism, though of course they have articulated this rediscovery in such a way that it keeps up the charade of criticality.
Whatever their flaws, the October writers were the most active and prominent cultural force producing the most compelling art writing for decades. For a time, it seemed as though new forms of art were incompatible with the old categories of judgment. But embracing that newness was itself a judgment. Moreover, just as an anti-aesthetic eventually and inevitably becomes an aesthetic, it becomes more possible to judge formerly innovative forms of art as they turn into familiar genres. The end result of this late-avant-garde model, which still plagues many art institutions today, is the neglect of the artwork itself as of fundamental importance in its own right, in favor of a “critique” that has given up on even the pretense of radical social change, and which is either tacitly or explicitly endorsed by the art institution that displays it.
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There seems to be a simple solution to this impasse: one could decide that art’s value does not depend on its critical autonomy from institutions at all. This was the position of the “post-avant-garde,” which succeeded the period Fraser brought to a symbolic end in 2003 and predominates in the present, for now. Post-avant-garde artists, who inherit ideas and formal approaches from the historical avant-garde but without sharing its goal of absolute criticality, operate under the assumption that art scenes are subcultural communities that navigate the institutions of art in nuanced ways. This attitude toward the institution allows space for ambivalence, modest complacency or even virulent criticism, but its aims are not to reform or destroy the system of art; it is to operate self-consciously within it. In this frame, the art world is not simply an oppressive bureaucracy but a culture, and “coolness” represents the socially mediated exercise of judgment within that culture. It marks which figures are considered by other members of the group to navigate this culture with a sense of flair or unpredictability, an exciting sensibility and so on.
Lutz Bacher (1943-2019) may be our most representative post-avant-garde artist: in her work, the development of an ambiguous artistic subjectivity becomes intrinsic to the artistic content. Where Fraser’s work could not reconcile her open critique of institutions with the practical need to work within them, Bacher opted for defensive strategies in navigating the art world, insulating her practice with a less categorical version of artistic autonomy. Bacher, a woman, adopted the pseudonym in the early 1970s and never publicly revealed her given name, initiating from the first a complex game of identity and signification. In 1976 she eschewed a conventional artist interview, opting to interview herself on her interest in the mysterious figure of Lee Harvey Oswald, and in 1994 created a twelve-hour video titled Do You Love Me?, consisting of the artist interviewing friends and family on the subject of herself, in the process revealing more about the interviewees and building up the oblique persona known as “Lutz.” In 2016, she delivered a lecture titled “SHOW’N TELL” where she recounted memories from her childhood, subverting her customary withholdingness while still providing little of the information one usually expects from an artist.
Bacher’s body of work is cool insofar as it is grounded in maintaining a frigid personal distance from the art world, but it is also cool in the sense of deploying found or readymade objects with a highly developed sense of style and wit, often appropriating unexpected pop-cultural signifiers: a print of Donald Trump’s signature extended as a scroll, an inflatable of a character from the app Angry Birds, swinger classifieds, videos of the Empire State Building, snowfall, an extended performance of the song “Crimson and Clover” at a memorial for Colin de Land and much else besides. The appeal of this approach lies in its articulation of a complex aesthetic sensibility through the disjunction between the various bodies of work—as opposed to a critical anti-aesthetic—as well as an extreme sensitivity to the subcultural context in which the work would be received. For Bacher, the art world was a set of expectations to be played with as opposed to a set of institutions to be overturned. In contrast to the totalizing demand for revolutionary utopia that Fraser had inherited from the avant-garde tradition, the stakes of her work were both smaller and more feasible, given contemporary conditions: managing to exist with a sense of personal freedom within the art system and to produce art that elicits enthusiasm from its audience.
Bacher is one of the artists who most directly shaped the sensibilities of the current New York art scene, and if she wasn’t the world’s most famous artist it was partly because she didn’t want to be. But an art world that revolves around art practices like hers is a fragile one: sophisticated and uncommercial enough to relish in an opaque grammar of reference and obscurity that is inaccessible to outsiders but still lucky enough to find money somewhere, thanks to exceptional personalities on the business side like de Land. The cultivated insularity of the post-avant-garde has clear utility for someone like Bacher, playing up the precise contemporaneity of the present as a way out of the avant-garde’s dependence on a knotted teleology. But the esoteric nature of the post-avant-garde subculture’s specific standards and language also indicates its precarity.
Subcultures have always existed, of course, and often they have been connected to avant-garde movements. But whereas earlier artistic subcultures had been valued as a means to an end, for their potential to incubate art that would eventually reach the mainstream and lead to radical social change, the post-avant-garde subculture prioritizes the cultivation of an attitude: particularly an attitude regarding the ethics of making or selling art in a way that insulates it from the compromising pressures of the market. The subcultural mode of the post-avant-garde maintains the self-distancing methodology of the avant-garde, but its metric of novelty is whatever is uncontrived, surprising and distinctively indicative of the moment in a way that other members of the subculture approve of—in a word, what is “cool.” This was, and is, the cultural model for contemporary art in the downtown mode that we started with. But as mentioned at the outset, the internet has increasingly encroached upon its viability.
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The post-avant-garde’s tentative extension of avant-garde novelty carries with it a number of nested assumptions: First, that new styles of art will reliably appear year after year, like seasonal fashion trends that distinguish the present from the past. Second, that the artistic devotion to expressing these developments will coincide with the stable growth of an art market that remains interested in this subcultural ecosystem. Third, that the possibility of distinguishing the present from the past implies a level of historical knowledge that makes it possible to differentiate the actually new from rehashed imitation. The internet upends all three of these assumptions. Starting with the third, the internet dilates the accessibility of all past media as an archive of free-floating aesthetic signifiers, rendering historical content accessible enough that it can be repeated in an endless simulacrum of ostensibly novel media. To the second, it incentivizes superficial trend-chasing, depriving artistic subcultures of attention in favor of, for example, generic painters whose careers have been conjured out of thin air by PR. (This leads in turn to a downturn in a market sustained only by the forced enthusiasm of speculative investors. Witness the phenomenon of Anna Weyant, whose uninspired but polished imitations of John Currin leapt from relative obscurity to Gagosian in 2022, then selling at auction for over one million dollars while she was still in her twenties and very publicly dating the gallery’s owner.) To the first, it turns cultural trends into bids for virality and mass attention, the always-already contrived and commodified subservience to the logic of the algorithm.
This is our state of affairs today. Most worthwhile contemporary art still emerges from the post-avant-garde model, but its practical and productive viability is tenuous; even the most well-respected artists in my social world, many in or nearing their forties, are marginal in terms of the market. They were the last generation to have had their formative artistic experiences in a cohesive “scene,” in the 2000s and 2010s, with galleries downstream of Reena Spaulings like Real Fine Arts and Lomex acting as social hubs and producing artists like Maggie Lee and Marc Kokopeli. For artists younger than that, the idea of being protected and fostered by a robust shared subculture appears to be an outdated fantasy.
Younger generations may be less tired than older ones, but the precarity of art in the 21st century has led Gen Z to forsake subcultural credibility for an instrumentalized careerism. In part because social media has reduced the social to the self-promotional, the romanticism of the authentic, alternative subculture begins to look ridiculously idealistic, so that, for an artist, selling out becomes less a threat to work around than a presumed condition of working at all. If the avant-garde and post-avant-garde were, on some level, the bulwarks that insulated artists from mass culture (and the need to conform to the mass-cultural market), contemporary conditions have negated the possibility of such a shield, just as they have severed the “umbilical cord of gold” that had financed radical art since Greenberg’s time. Today, the art market is too preoccupied with money to take a serious interest in the risk of actual culture.
These conditions are bleak, to be sure, but possibilities can still be wrested from them. If the internet and the art market have conspired to ravage the cultural mechanisms that support contemporary art, the result need not be only despair. It is possible to engage in a reconsideration that makes a true break with the increasingly remote heritage of the avant-garde. It may even be something to celebrate that the internet has killed art’s faith in the progressive periodization of styles and innovations.
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The primary weakness of the post-avant-garde attitude was the persistence of the conflation of newness with presentness. As it happened, the demotion of the avant-garde’s desire to reinvent society led to the empty equation of novelty with artistic value. This equation is clearly untenable now that TikTok and Instagram Reels can provide a constant, vertiginous stream of up-to-the-moment new media. But art’s function, finally, is not simply to produce newness.
The decoupling of art from the demands of progress should reorient our sense of what artists ought to aspire to, and it should also dramatically reorient our attitude toward the history of art. This is perhaps easiest to see when we look back at contemporary reactions to the late works of painters such as Francis Picabia, Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning. What we might now see as reliably great, even still shockingly impressive works by modern masters were each dismissed in their time for being washed-up and out of step; Picabia in the 1930s and Guston in the 1970s had tarnished their formerly radical associations by turning to figurative painting, while de Kooning’s stalwart loyalty to Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s and 1970s elicited little more than scoffing in an art world that had moved on to minimalism and conceptualism. Today, liberated from the pretenses of contemporaneity, our tastes can be more catholic.
The ease of access to the history of art wrought by the internet throws us back into history, not in the manner of a reactionary traditionalism, but as the possibility of a greater exposure to the breadth of all artistic production than has ever before been possible. The result of this exposure can be the apprehension of the profound contingency and relativity of the present as well as the past, thus negating both the normative belief in the stability of traditional culture and the contemporary addiction to the present as the twin loci of artistic activity. Instead, the history of art reveals its purpose as the preservation of the richness of human experience across time, the intangible fabric of lived experience in all its foreignness and surprising familiarity. Art, at root, does not directly change the world as much as it preserves the phenomena of the past in a way that’s otherwise intangible to later generations. In this sense it is a historical document of the particularity of the past, but also an image of the nature of humanity and what used to be called the soul. The goal of art in the present must be the reactivation of history, the restarting of temporality, but not as a return to the linear narratives favored by the avant-garde, or as a way to celebrate the present in itself as the post-avant-garde did.
This may sound semi-utopian coming from a critic like myself, but the situation is admittedly more fraught from the point of view of the artist. Developing an art practice has always been a demanding task, and it would be presumptuous for anyone to dictate what form it ought to take. For better or worse, however, the internet represents an epistemic break on the order of the rediscovery of classical culture and the invention of the printing press during the Renaissance. As we all know, this shift is mostly experienced negatively as brain-frying, doomscrolling, rising illiteracy, and AI ruining homework. But for the arts it has the potential to act as a radical reorientation of temporality, a dilation of the contingency of all art-historical periods—including our own.
Renaissance art may have been inspired by Greek and Roman art, just as jazz appropriated blues, folk and popular musical standards, but those sources did not predetermine the end points of those fertile and wildly disparate artistic periods. Likewise, the internet, treated as an archive, can be used as a substrate for unprecedented forms of artistic development. What I am calling for is not ironic postmodern appropriations of art history that rely on a glib presentism, or an aesthetic traditionalism that fetishizes past art forms and dooms itself to producing cheap imitations of what came before. The rehistoricized artist, by contrast, remains contemporary while forging a relationship to history, a love of Shakespeare but also for Cao Xueqin, Michael Asher as well as Antonello da Messina, the anonymous creators of African masks and Romanesque capitals, Angkor Wat and Australian Aboriginal art, and Laozi and Montaigne, and Beethoven, and Pandit Pran Nath, and Buster Keaton and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and Marguerite Duras. This anatomy of influence, what was once hemmed in by the biased canons of Western art history, academia and national pride, is now an open field. It’s here, waiting with its embarrassment of riches, for anyone motivated enough to forgo contemporary distractions and sift through it.
Bill Hayden’s show at Gandt last May, Ding Dong, comes to mind as an example of art that meets this new paradigm. The exhibition, in a wood-paneled basement studio apartment in Astoria, Queens, consisted of six framed ink-and-wax drawings on paper of figurative subjects, mounted on freestanding cables attached to the floor and ceiling. In order: dinosaur eggs; a confusingly colored map of Europe that might partially be based on medieval maps, but Russia is cut across by horizontal rainbow lines that make it look like the LGBTQ flag; a pair of drawings both titled Orbs, one of a bubble in a box, the other a different angle of the same scene but revealing within the bubble a yellow duck-like figure with a head somewhere between the prehistoric and the Cubist and the Death Star; an untitled Chardin-like still life with some cheese, a half-eaten fruit, some cloth, nuts and maybe a mushroom stem or a bone on a counter, some piles of spices and calibration weights on a shelf in the background, and the tops of seven large bones leaning against the side of the counter; finally, a cartoon anthropomorphic weed leaf carrying a cross. On their own the straightforward works would be unexceptional, and the strange ones might come off as merely jokey, but as a whole the constellation of images is entirely inscrutable. What on earth could it mean?
In a literal sense the works flagrantly mean nothing. Scrutinizing their curation and their underlying logic inspires a hallucinatory disorientation as the familiar shape of Europe disintegrates into an accumulation of obscure or nonsensical lines. Although the work is mute (the exhibition text consisted of three sing-song poems about monkeys, flying and fear), the strangeness clearly proceeds from a sensibility that belongs indefinably to the present, a studied incoherence that would be impossible to conceive of fifteen years ago, let alone a hundred. But the sensibility is not overtly contemporary either, immersed as it is in the transference of images between the past and present, in a reference to eighteenth-century still life and the unspeakably ironic yet somehow straight-faced image of a cartoon weed leaf in the Stations of the Cross. It does not aspire to be something new or something old.
Temporality may seem to be an intangible quality in the experience of an artwork, but in fact it’s a surprisingly precise feeling to be confronted with art that feels ineluctably of one’s own time and place. There really is a profound difference between appreciating an artwork that successfully inhabits our present moment and one that achieved the same five hundred or even fifty years ago. Perhaps we’re so inured to the accumulation of past representations of the present and their imitations that it becomes easy to forget, but our experience of the persisting vitality of a great work of art is a recognition that it was adequate to the consciousness of its own time. Only art can make us see our world with fresh eyes. And it’s precisely now, when everything carries the air of the unnecessary and the interchangeable, that we need the specificity and eloquence of an art that preserves the possibility of something more durable.
Art Credit: Lutz Bacher, Angry Bird, 2016. Printed polyester, helium balloon. 110 × 80 × 1 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Lutz Bacher and Galerie Buchholz.
The last pre-covid exhibition at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in downtown New York was titled Paint-It-Yourself. The exhibit, showing new work by Merlin Carpenter, consisted of ten large, blank canvases and a box of paints in the center. During the opening, the crowd took up the paints and made childish paintings of stupid, ironic jokes: a scrawled “BANKS ARE COOL,” dollar signs, a vomiting head, an alien head, a crude rainbow, text written by one person and crossed out by another, etc. If I rolled my eyes at Paint-It-Yourself in 2020, in retrospect I can see it as a mildly brilliant exercise in art-scene recursiveness. The paintings were made by the audience and for that same audience, expressing the id of a social scene, the idiotic glee of a specific time and place.
If nothing else, my estimation of Paint-It-Yourself has improved because I look back fondly at what I once took for granted. The downtown art scene may have already been past its peak, but the neighborhood was better before a million articles turned it into “Dimes Square,” just as Dimes Square would be better than the TikTok influencers who would invade just a few years later. Reena Spaulings is still there, and I still associate the downtown scene with much of the most exciting and challenging art being made today. But the increasingly hollow imitations of culture in the neighborhood are indicative of the larger threat that the internet poses to the in-person communities that have always sustained artistic scenes, in part by developing their own at least semi-autonomous criteria for what counts as “cool” within them. When the art market can get by with flashy and ineffectual figurative paintings that are easy to sell on Instagram, it no longer has any reason to care about what’s going on in artistic subcultures. Indeed, those subcultures no longer have any reason to care about themselves. This isn’t to say, however, that the internet alone made art uncool. Not at all.
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I sometimes half-joke that the art world died in 2003. In that account, the two signal events from that year are the death of the art dealer Colin de Land and Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a video work that consists of footage of the artist having sex with a collector who had agreed to buy an edition of the work beforehand. To my knowledge neither had a tangible effect on the art world at large beyond New York, but both represented an inflection point for the late-avant-garde framework that had sustained that world since the early Nineties.
De Land was a late, DIY version of Leo Castelli, someone whose respected position and informal panache—holding art fairs in the rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel, teaching art history to prospective collectors, wearing a modified trucker hat that read “Don’t bother me unless you’re buyin’”—allowed him to mediate between radical, uncommercial artists and an active collector base. His death marked the end of the “gentleman dealer.” Versions of this model have been tried in the decades since, but American Fine Arts, Co., along with his wife Pat Hearn’s eponymous gallery (both died of cancer while still in their forties; Hearn died in 2000), still stand as the high points of the time when the most exciting new artists—Tishan Hsu, ART CLUB2000, John Knight, Jutta Koether, Christian Philipp Müller, as well as Andrea Fraser—were being shown by the coolest gallerists. No one would confuse de Land with a mainstream market titan like Larry Gagosian, but nevertheless the tradition of the cool New York gallery has never improved upon his model.
Andrea Fraser more nearly documents the last moments of the avant-garde from the perspective of the artist. Leading up to the provocations of Untitled, her practice in the late 1980s and 1990s consisted of rigorously anti-aesthetic critical interventions, prominently in the form of video performances that parodied the art world’s conceits and pretensions—scrupulously adopting and exaggerating the affect of an affluent, self-possessed museum guide in Museum Highlights (1989) and Welcome to the Wadsworth (1991), acting as a culture reporter in Reporting from São Paulo, I’m from the United States (1998), or cycling through impersonations of a range of art-world personality types in a mock reception speech (while stripping down to her underwear) in Official Welcome (2001). Her farcical reproductions of the social edifices of the art world worked in part because of their near-slapstick humor but also through exhibitionistic self-implication: portraying the ego that comes from success and validation along with the shame of critiquing a system that then rewards one for their critiques. This mounting tension between the institutional critic who scorns the art world and the artist who wants fame and attention couldn’t sustain itself indefinitely, however, and Untitled marks the point where Fraser’s self-critique reached its limit and turned in on itself.
It’s easy enough to say that there is an allegorical message in Fraser’s performance—selling art is “selling yourself”—but there is no self-criticism embedded in it. While taking her exhibitionism to an extreme, what really distinguished the video was the way it foreclosed the possibility of any critical or ambiguous distance between the artwork and its sale. Fraser made a sex tape with a buyer, and an edition of the work was sold; the work amounts to an unusually frank admission that she had sold out. Of her generation, Fraser was perhaps the most totally committed to the avant-garde tradition of the autonomous, critical artist. By dramatizing her capitulation to the logic of the art market, she signaled the impossibility of institutional critique at the turn of the century.
By avant-garde, I mean art movements that rejected traditional media and sought to work in an expanded field that went beyond the physical object, beginning with Dadaism and Russian Constructivism in the 1910s. This lineage, which took hold most consequentially with the rise of the more conceptual schools of art in the 1960s, concerns itself with a reflexive examination of the conditions of art and thus seeks to expand or revolutionize those conditions: very roughly, minimalism deals with the space around art, conceptualism with the dimension of thought in art, and institutional critique with the systems of the art world itself. What was crucial in these developments was the underlying utopian teleology, a post-Hegelian faith that radical, critical art would bring about a corresponding change in society, whether by decommodifying art, abolishing the separation between art and life or inciting political revolution.
This belief in inevitable historical progress ran aground in two ways during the final third of the twentieth century. Culturally speaking, it was a victim of its own success. Even by the 1980s, the figure of the radical artist who stood at odds with society had become so compulsory, and the countercultural inheritance of the Sixties had so dissipated the conventional strictures of mass society, that resistance and novelty had become a de-rigueur and indeed normative position in art and culture. Eventually, the figure of the innovative avant-garde artist transformed from the rebellious outsider living in a garret to the ambitious startup founder who “disrupts” the market to establish their brand. In short, épater les bourgeois took on an entirely different and more ineffectual meaning as soon as the respectable classes decided they wanted art to shock them. Politically, meanwhile, the end-of-history Nineties were a death knell for the idea that the avant-garde was poised to create a new society, as the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the seeming triumph of global capitalism effectively reduced leftism to an eccentric side project of liberal internationalism.
Within the artistic avant-garde, the full effect of these developments would take hold slowly (and in some places, not at all). But one symptom of them, at least, could be seen in the narrowing of concern of the avant-garde to the institutions that were specifically associated with art. Avant-garde critique, at least in Fraser’s late iteration, stakes itself on an either/or: art is either hostile to the institutions that show, promote and sell art, or it is complicit with them.
Because Fraser herself could not resolve this dilemma in her practice, she was left with an either/or of her own: either make peace with the institution or give up on art. She evidently chose the former (she’s still a working artist), and her art since Untitled has moved decisively away from critiquing the art world, instead gravitating toward reenactments of psychoanalytic or political conversations, such as a “group relations” session or a radio broadcast of a discussion between feminist men. Yet shorn of their humor and self-critical edge, the performances have become toothless and arbitrary; there’s little gained by her one-woman restagings of these interactions, except for the proof of her virtuosic abilities as a mimic. Perhaps after Untitled she decided the only way for her to remain an artist was by taking refuge in extra-artistic interests, to come to terms with the institution of art by giving up on the importance of art as such.
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Fraser’s compromise was indicative of a larger crisis in the art world at the turn of the 21st century. The year after Fraser produced Untitled, four editors of the influential art journal October released an art-history textbook titled Art Since 1900. Founded in 1976 to give voice to the emerging theoretical discourse around postmodern art, October had been influenced by the then-new strains of French poststructuralist philosophy, along with psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, phenomenology, semiotics and so on. Crucially, the journal’s writers rejected traditional categories of aesthetic judgment, due at least in part to their antipathy toward the previous generation’s preeminent art critic, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg himself had been the champion of Abstract Expressionism, postwar America’s primary avant-garde movement through the 1950s, but his conception of artistic judgment had remained grounded in visual notions of formal harmony and aesthetic autonomy. This led him to reject later avant-garde movements that increasingly sought to break with those values through the Sixties and Seventies, like Pop Art, minimalism, land art and conceptualism, as well as their precursors, such as Dadaism and Surrealism. These were the very movements that October aimed to validate as an anti-aesthetic counter-canon, in part by dismissing judgment as bourgeois or otherwise hopelessly outdated and instead turning to theory for the valorizing terms of their criticism. By the time of the textbook’s publication in 2004, however, the once-insurgent critical language of the October editors had become the de facto institutional language of the art world—a shift that changed late-avant-garde artists such as Fraser from adversaries of the art system into its representatives.
Fraser described this dynamic in 2005:
This process of incorporation comes for every avant-gardism; what Dadaists and minimalists declared as new forms of art eventually became the established aesthetic categories for the next generation of artists. October’s rhetoric, and thus the theoretical framing of the work of an artist like Fraser, was dependent on the continuation of this narrative of the autonomous vanguard. Certain groups of radical artists were able to keep up this recursive process through the 1990s, but Art Since 1900 and Untitled both signaled that, by 2004, the “critical” and “autonomous” artist had become—for the artist and the art institutions alike—mostly a useful fiction.
There have continued to be developments in art since 2004, of course. But anyone who follows them closely will recognize that the institutionalization of criticality characterizes most of the major trends in art over the last twenty years, particularly in institutions like contemporary art museums and the international art biennials. The totalizing wave of identity-political, “care”-political, climate-political or anything-as-long-as-it’s-political art that dominates the institutional art-biennial circuit is supported by a post-conceptual skeleton of critique inherited from October, in most if not all cases utilized to repeat formerly vanguard practices or launder formerly proscribed, now-conventional art practices with tacked-on social narratives. (Among other things, this has led to an extreme reliance on wall texts to dictate an artwork’s importance: a bowl on the ground can explore climate change because it was produced in a country where rising sea levels are a problem, or it could be significant to the artist because it reminds them of their grandmother. It’s impossible for the viewer to glean such symbolism without reading a textual supplement.) In a particularly ironic turn, the 2026 Whitney Biennial employed “mood” as the latest buzzword in the institutional repertoire of overextended postcritical rhetoric. The term comes from an 1899 paper by art historian Alois Riegl but, as far as I can tell, it’s simply being used to smuggle in the aesthetic surfaces that October’s entire project sought to disqualify. This means that institutions have finally found their way back to aestheticism, though of course they have articulated this rediscovery in such a way that it keeps up the charade of criticality.
Whatever their flaws, the October writers were the most active and prominent cultural force producing the most compelling art writing for decades. For a time, it seemed as though new forms of art were incompatible with the old categories of judgment. But embracing that newness was itself a judgment. Moreover, just as an anti-aesthetic eventually and inevitably becomes an aesthetic, it becomes more possible to judge formerly innovative forms of art as they turn into familiar genres. The end result of this late-avant-garde model, which still plagues many art institutions today, is the neglect of the artwork itself as of fundamental importance in its own right, in favor of a “critique” that has given up on even the pretense of radical social change, and which is either tacitly or explicitly endorsed by the art institution that displays it.
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There seems to be a simple solution to this impasse: one could decide that art’s value does not depend on its critical autonomy from institutions at all. This was the position of the “post-avant-garde,” which succeeded the period Fraser brought to a symbolic end in 2003 and predominates in the present, for now. Post-avant-garde artists, who inherit ideas and formal approaches from the historical avant-garde but without sharing its goal of absolute criticality, operate under the assumption that art scenes are subcultural communities that navigate the institutions of art in nuanced ways. This attitude toward the institution allows space for ambivalence, modest complacency or even virulent criticism, but its aims are not to reform or destroy the system of art; it is to operate self-consciously within it. In this frame, the art world is not simply an oppressive bureaucracy but a culture, and “coolness” represents the socially mediated exercise of judgment within that culture. It marks which figures are considered by other members of the group to navigate this culture with a sense of flair or unpredictability, an exciting sensibility and so on.
Lutz Bacher (1943-2019) may be our most representative post-avant-garde artist: in her work, the development of an ambiguous artistic subjectivity becomes intrinsic to the artistic content. Where Fraser’s work could not reconcile her open critique of institutions with the practical need to work within them, Bacher opted for defensive strategies in navigating the art world, insulating her practice with a less categorical version of artistic autonomy. Bacher, a woman, adopted the pseudonym in the early 1970s and never publicly revealed her given name, initiating from the first a complex game of identity and signification. In 1976 she eschewed a conventional artist interview, opting to interview herself on her interest in the mysterious figure of Lee Harvey Oswald, and in 1994 created a twelve-hour video titled Do You Love Me?, consisting of the artist interviewing friends and family on the subject of herself, in the process revealing more about the interviewees and building up the oblique persona known as “Lutz.” In 2016, she delivered a lecture titled “SHOW’N TELL” where she recounted memories from her childhood, subverting her customary withholdingness while still providing little of the information one usually expects from an artist.
Bacher’s body of work is cool insofar as it is grounded in maintaining a frigid personal distance from the art world, but it is also cool in the sense of deploying found or readymade objects with a highly developed sense of style and wit, often appropriating unexpected pop-cultural signifiers: a print of Donald Trump’s signature extended as a scroll, an inflatable of a character from the app Angry Birds, swinger classifieds, videos of the Empire State Building, snowfall, an extended performance of the song “Crimson and Clover” at a memorial for Colin de Land and much else besides. The appeal of this approach lies in its articulation of a complex aesthetic sensibility through the disjunction between the various bodies of work—as opposed to a critical anti-aesthetic—as well as an extreme sensitivity to the subcultural context in which the work would be received. For Bacher, the art world was a set of expectations to be played with as opposed to a set of institutions to be overturned. In contrast to the totalizing demand for revolutionary utopia that Fraser had inherited from the avant-garde tradition, the stakes of her work were both smaller and more feasible, given contemporary conditions: managing to exist with a sense of personal freedom within the art system and to produce art that elicits enthusiasm from its audience.
Bacher is one of the artists who most directly shaped the sensibilities of the current New York art scene, and if she wasn’t the world’s most famous artist it was partly because she didn’t want to be. But an art world that revolves around art practices like hers is a fragile one: sophisticated and uncommercial enough to relish in an opaque grammar of reference and obscurity that is inaccessible to outsiders but still lucky enough to find money somewhere, thanks to exceptional personalities on the business side like de Land. The cultivated insularity of the post-avant-garde has clear utility for someone like Bacher, playing up the precise contemporaneity of the present as a way out of the avant-garde’s dependence on a knotted teleology. But the esoteric nature of the post-avant-garde subculture’s specific standards and language also indicates its precarity.
Subcultures have always existed, of course, and often they have been connected to avant-garde movements. But whereas earlier artistic subcultures had been valued as a means to an end, for their potential to incubate art that would eventually reach the mainstream and lead to radical social change, the post-avant-garde subculture prioritizes the cultivation of an attitude: particularly an attitude regarding the ethics of making or selling art in a way that insulates it from the compromising pressures of the market. The subcultural mode of the post-avant-garde maintains the self-distancing methodology of the avant-garde, but its metric of novelty is whatever is uncontrived, surprising and distinctively indicative of the moment in a way that other members of the subculture approve of—in a word, what is “cool.” This was, and is, the cultural model for contemporary art in the downtown mode that we started with. But as mentioned at the outset, the internet has increasingly encroached upon its viability.
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The post-avant-garde’s tentative extension of avant-garde novelty carries with it a number of nested assumptions: First, that new styles of art will reliably appear year after year, like seasonal fashion trends that distinguish the present from the past. Second, that the artistic devotion to expressing these developments will coincide with the stable growth of an art market that remains interested in this subcultural ecosystem. Third, that the possibility of distinguishing the present from the past implies a level of historical knowledge that makes it possible to differentiate the actually new from rehashed imitation. The internet upends all three of these assumptions. Starting with the third, the internet dilates the accessibility of all past media as an archive of free-floating aesthetic signifiers, rendering historical content accessible enough that it can be repeated in an endless simulacrum of ostensibly novel media. To the second, it incentivizes superficial trend-chasing, depriving artistic subcultures of attention in favor of, for example, generic painters whose careers have been conjured out of thin air by PR. (This leads in turn to a downturn in a market sustained only by the forced enthusiasm of speculative investors. Witness the phenomenon of Anna Weyant, whose uninspired but polished imitations of John Currin leapt from relative obscurity to Gagosian in 2022, then selling at auction for over one million dollars while she was still in her twenties and very publicly dating the gallery’s owner.) To the first, it turns cultural trends into bids for virality and mass attention, the always-already contrived and commodified subservience to the logic of the algorithm.
This is our state of affairs today. Most worthwhile contemporary art still emerges from the post-avant-garde model, but its practical and productive viability is tenuous; even the most well-respected artists in my social world, many in or nearing their forties, are marginal in terms of the market. They were the last generation to have had their formative artistic experiences in a cohesive “scene,” in the 2000s and 2010s, with galleries downstream of Reena Spaulings like Real Fine Arts and Lomex acting as social hubs and producing artists like Maggie Lee and Marc Kokopeli. For artists younger than that, the idea of being protected and fostered by a robust shared subculture appears to be an outdated fantasy.
Younger generations may be less tired than older ones, but the precarity of art in the 21st century has led Gen Z to forsake subcultural credibility for an instrumentalized careerism. In part because social media has reduced the social to the self-promotional, the romanticism of the authentic, alternative subculture begins to look ridiculously idealistic, so that, for an artist, selling out becomes less a threat to work around than a presumed condition of working at all. If the avant-garde and post-avant-garde were, on some level, the bulwarks that insulated artists from mass culture (and the need to conform to the mass-cultural market), contemporary conditions have negated the possibility of such a shield, just as they have severed the “umbilical cord of gold” that had financed radical art since Greenberg’s time. Today, the art market is too preoccupied with money to take a serious interest in the risk of actual culture.
These conditions are bleak, to be sure, but possibilities can still be wrested from them. If the internet and the art market have conspired to ravage the cultural mechanisms that support contemporary art, the result need not be only despair. It is possible to engage in a reconsideration that makes a true break with the increasingly remote heritage of the avant-garde. It may even be something to celebrate that the internet has killed art’s faith in the progressive periodization of styles and innovations.
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The primary weakness of the post-avant-garde attitude was the persistence of the conflation of newness with presentness. As it happened, the demotion of the avant-garde’s desire to reinvent society led to the empty equation of novelty with artistic value. This equation is clearly untenable now that TikTok and Instagram Reels can provide a constant, vertiginous stream of up-to-the-moment new media. But art’s function, finally, is not simply to produce newness.
The decoupling of art from the demands of progress should reorient our sense of what artists ought to aspire to, and it should also dramatically reorient our attitude toward the history of art. This is perhaps easiest to see when we look back at contemporary reactions to the late works of painters such as Francis Picabia, Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning. What we might now see as reliably great, even still shockingly impressive works by modern masters were each dismissed in their time for being washed-up and out of step; Picabia in the 1930s and Guston in the 1970s had tarnished their formerly radical associations by turning to figurative painting, while de Kooning’s stalwart loyalty to Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s and 1970s elicited little more than scoffing in an art world that had moved on to minimalism and conceptualism. Today, liberated from the pretenses of contemporaneity, our tastes can be more catholic.
The ease of access to the history of art wrought by the internet throws us back into history, not in the manner of a reactionary traditionalism, but as the possibility of a greater exposure to the breadth of all artistic production than has ever before been possible. The result of this exposure can be the apprehension of the profound contingency and relativity of the present as well as the past, thus negating both the normative belief in the stability of traditional culture and the contemporary addiction to the present as the twin loci of artistic activity. Instead, the history of art reveals its purpose as the preservation of the richness of human experience across time, the intangible fabric of lived experience in all its foreignness and surprising familiarity. Art, at root, does not directly change the world as much as it preserves the phenomena of the past in a way that’s otherwise intangible to later generations. In this sense it is a historical document of the particularity of the past, but also an image of the nature of humanity and what used to be called the soul. The goal of art in the present must be the reactivation of history, the restarting of temporality, but not as a return to the linear narratives favored by the avant-garde, or as a way to celebrate the present in itself as the post-avant-garde did.
This may sound semi-utopian coming from a critic like myself, but the situation is admittedly more fraught from the point of view of the artist. Developing an art practice has always been a demanding task, and it would be presumptuous for anyone to dictate what form it ought to take. For better or worse, however, the internet represents an epistemic break on the order of the rediscovery of classical culture and the invention of the printing press during the Renaissance. As we all know, this shift is mostly experienced negatively as brain-frying, doomscrolling, rising illiteracy, and AI ruining homework. But for the arts it has the potential to act as a radical reorientation of temporality, a dilation of the contingency of all art-historical periods—including our own.
Renaissance art may have been inspired by Greek and Roman art, just as jazz appropriated blues, folk and popular musical standards, but those sources did not predetermine the end points of those fertile and wildly disparate artistic periods. Likewise, the internet, treated as an archive, can be used as a substrate for unprecedented forms of artistic development. What I am calling for is not ironic postmodern appropriations of art history that rely on a glib presentism, or an aesthetic traditionalism that fetishizes past art forms and dooms itself to producing cheap imitations of what came before. The rehistoricized artist, by contrast, remains contemporary while forging a relationship to history, a love of Shakespeare but also for Cao Xueqin, Michael Asher as well as Antonello da Messina, the anonymous creators of African masks and Romanesque capitals, Angkor Wat and Australian Aboriginal art, and Laozi and Montaigne, and Beethoven, and Pandit Pran Nath, and Buster Keaton and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and Marguerite Duras. This anatomy of influence, what was once hemmed in by the biased canons of Western art history, academia and national pride, is now an open field. It’s here, waiting with its embarrassment of riches, for anyone motivated enough to forgo contemporary distractions and sift through it.
Bill Hayden’s show at Gandt last May, Ding Dong, comes to mind as an example of art that meets this new paradigm. The exhibition, in a wood-paneled basement studio apartment in Astoria, Queens, consisted of six framed ink-and-wax drawings on paper of figurative subjects, mounted on freestanding cables attached to the floor and ceiling. In order: dinosaur eggs; a confusingly colored map of Europe that might partially be based on medieval maps, but Russia is cut across by horizontal rainbow lines that make it look like the LGBTQ flag; a pair of drawings both titled Orbs, one of a bubble in a box, the other a different angle of the same scene but revealing within the bubble a yellow duck-like figure with a head somewhere between the prehistoric and the Cubist and the Death Star; an untitled Chardin-like still life with some cheese, a half-eaten fruit, some cloth, nuts and maybe a mushroom stem or a bone on a counter, some piles of spices and calibration weights on a shelf in the background, and the tops of seven large bones leaning against the side of the counter; finally, a cartoon anthropomorphic weed leaf carrying a cross. On their own the straightforward works would be unexceptional, and the strange ones might come off as merely jokey, but as a whole the constellation of images is entirely inscrutable. What on earth could it mean?
In a literal sense the works flagrantly mean nothing. Scrutinizing their curation and their underlying logic inspires a hallucinatory disorientation as the familiar shape of Europe disintegrates into an accumulation of obscure or nonsensical lines. Although the work is mute (the exhibition text consisted of three sing-song poems about monkeys, flying and fear), the strangeness clearly proceeds from a sensibility that belongs indefinably to the present, a studied incoherence that would be impossible to conceive of fifteen years ago, let alone a hundred. But the sensibility is not overtly contemporary either, immersed as it is in the transference of images between the past and present, in a reference to eighteenth-century still life and the unspeakably ironic yet somehow straight-faced image of a cartoon weed leaf in the Stations of the Cross. It does not aspire to be something new or something old.
Temporality may seem to be an intangible quality in the experience of an artwork, but in fact it’s a surprisingly precise feeling to be confronted with art that feels ineluctably of one’s own time and place. There really is a profound difference between appreciating an artwork that successfully inhabits our present moment and one that achieved the same five hundred or even fifty years ago. Perhaps we’re so inured to the accumulation of past representations of the present and their imitations that it becomes easy to forget, but our experience of the persisting vitality of a great work of art is a recognition that it was adequate to the consciousness of its own time. Only art can make us see our world with fresh eyes. And it’s precisely now, when everything carries the air of the unnecessary and the interchangeable, that we need the specificity and eloquence of an art that preserves the possibility of something more durable.
Art Credit: Lutz Bacher, Angry Bird, 2016. Printed polyester, helium balloon. 110 × 80 × 1 cm. Courtesy of the Estate of Lutz Bacher and Galerie Buchholz.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.