post-internet

the last avant-garde

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There’s a malaise in the art world. The young and creative flock to readings rather than openings. For the first time, the art market is in decline while the stock market surges. There are no critics. There are no movements. There are no famous artists—outside of the art world that is.

Last month, the state of affairs was discussed by Dean Kissick in his Harper’s piece “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art.” As was quickly pointed out, this isn’t the first time art has been declared dead, destroyed, over. In fact, it’s not even the first time Harper’s has declared art dead, destroyed, over.

Fifty years ago, the magazine excerpted Tom Wolfe’s then-new book, The Painted Word. Kissick and Wolfe come to strikingly similar conclusions. Art in both eras has been colonized by discourse—words—and as a result become boring. In Wolfe’s time, the seventies, it was theory (though he pauses to chastise the “propaganda paintings” of the socialist nineteen-thirties). In our time, it’s politics.

A pedant might insist these are problems are different in character. But a text is a text. Whether it is a philosophical treatise or a political slogan is beside the point. The end result is the same. To quote Wolfe: “The paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”

Art without boundaries submits easily to conquest.

There is another even more ancient art text on this topic that gets to the point. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” by the critic Clement Greenberg is canon. No one graduates with any sort of arts degree—historical, theoretical, studio or otherwise—without reading it. It sets up the fundamental binary through which we still judge art today. Is it authentic or inauthentic, in good taste or in poor taste, avant-garde or kitsch.

Greenberg writes:

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.

The text—political or otherwise—is the formula. The outrage is the faked sensation. The style is incidental. The artwork is forgettable. Kissick and Wolfe are looking for the avant-garde.

All they find is kitsch.

Greenberg is a contentious figure: indisputably the most important critic of the twentieth century, the high priest of modernist theory, a writer whose ideas provide a baseline understanding of art—even after being wholly rejected and lampooned. (Wolfe dedicates an entire chapter in The Painted Word skewering Greenberg’s dogmatism—an engine of kitsch in and of itself.)

But even those who would accuse Greenberg of being masculinist, elitist, fanatical, puritanical, whatever may find themselves accidentally using his concepts, aligning with his opinions, especially concerning the avant-garde. They are not technicians, though they are highly-skilled. They are do not mimic the ideas of others, but find newness within their mediums. And above all: “the true and most important function of the avant-garde [is] to keep culture moving…”

See Greenberg’s bombast below:

The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape—not its picture—is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals.

Kissick’s nostalgia for the art world past doesn’t sound so different:

Only ten years ago, the art world was something very different: a globalized circuit of biennials and fairs that ran on the international trade of ideas and commodities. It was a space of spectacle and innovation, where artists tried out wildly different mediums and entertained radical ideas about what art could do and why. They were workshopping new cultural forms for a new millennium. Art was where experimentation happened, where people worked out what it felt like to be alive in this strange new century and how to give that feeling a form. Artists were researchers who were never expected to come to any conclusions. They had the freedom of absolute purposelessness.

While the era discussed above is not given a name, it has one. Kissick is describing the era of post-internet art: Brad Troemel’s DORITOSLOCOS taco from Taco Bell MASTER LOCKED shut (Key Sold Separately for $5) circulating through Tumblr, Jon Rafman’s compendium of landscapes sourced via Google Maps, Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Amalia Ulman’s Instagram-powered hoax Excellences & Perfections, DISimages, the stock photography collection purveyed by art collective DIS, Ryan Trecartin’s early use of YouTube to disseminate his video work A Family Finds Entertainment, Petra Cortright’s Photo Booth style self-portraiture, VVEBCAM, Martyn Sim’s Google Search oversharing, EVERYTHINGIVEEVERWANTEDTOKNOW.COM, Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop-composed, gradient color field paintings, the surf club Nasty Nets.

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You can find an online anthology containing these works, among others on Rhizome, the New York non-profit ‘operating at the intersection of art and technology.’ (Full disclosure: a trend report from my art collective K-HOLE is included in the anthology.) Organized under the broader rubric of net art, it spans the new media art of the early web and the post-internet art of web 2.0, documenting "art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it" per Rhizome executive director, Michael Connor.

Or to put it more simply: art whose medium is the internet.

Some of the dynamism of this era was a side effect of first mover advantage. The internet was a fundamentally new medium whose implications, abilities, and parameters were in flux. Some of the dynamism was powered by the earnest idealism that accompanied the new technology. Maybe it was possible to make free art with free tools that could reach vast new audiences! And some of that dynamism was powered by cynicism. The new digital archetypes of the troll and the hacker paired perfectly with that ever-popular avant-garde sentiment: épatez la bourgeoisie—it is, after all, the sentiment that powered two centuries of artistic innovation.

The term ‘post-internet’—properly confusing and counter-intuitive—was coined by Gene McHugh in a 2010 blogpost. Post-internet art was “art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as ‘post-internet’—when the internet is less a novelty and more a banality.” This definition is difficult to parse fifteen years out. It comes just before smartphones, social media, and now AI achieved ubiquity.

The history of the internet’s impact on the world is anything but banal.

But the cyberpunk fever dream of the nineties was definitively over by 2010. You’ll notice a conspicuous lack of microchips and circuitboards in post-internet art. There is no techno-kitsch. The creative output is fittingly scattershot.

After all, what exactly is the internet as a medium? Is it the screen, the code, the users? Is it the circadian-rhythm-disrupting LED light? The vectors of the letterforms code is written with? Is it the information the users input? Is it a way to use the narrative and the literary in a way that is not fundamentally kitsch? Seemingly so. For a moment at least it was.

Where is post-internet art now? In the collections of museums, the vaults of freeports, the beach houses of the Hamptons—the physical works at least. Some digital works have been saved by the heroic efforts of digital conservators at institutions like Rhizome or the Internet Archive. (One lie among many we believed fifteen years ago was that the internet is forever.) Others are dead links, screenshots, doomed to be revisited in oral histories.

Avant-gardes, like sharks, die as soon as they stop moving. If they’re lucky, they become fixed in art history. Why did post-internet art stop moving?

You can only follow Clement Greenberg’s dictum to ignore ideology for so long. This is why moments of incandescent creativity are always short-lived. Eventually, the contradictions pile up. As a participant, I feel a bit like a generational traitor for pointing out post-internet’s delusions. But so be it:

1. How can art be free and make money?

2. How can we sell ideas as property?

3. How can we be elitist and anti-elitist?

4. How can our work be mass and niche?

5. How can our work be sublime and mundane?

6. How can we make paintings that aren’t paintings?

Before any of these issues could begin to be resolved, presuming any can be resolved, Brexit happened and then Trump and the propaganda painting approach mocked by Tom Wolfe returned once again. This peaked during the pandemic, and like most prominent institutions, the art world adopted a hysterical tone, it embraced an ambient paranoia, and worst of all, it presumed this was simply the way things were going to be moving forward.

Thankfully, that hasn’t come to pass.

What has come to pass is an art world with no contemporary avant-gardes.

Crypto certainly wanted to be the next avant-garde. But if there were ever a formulaic medium, it’s web3. Tell me, what can’t you sell as an NFT? I’m sorry—how is fartcoin not kitsch? The identitarian left certainly thought it was an avant-garde, but that was a movement which dared not speak its own name. Can you image the outrage if a museum did a retrospective on ‘woke art’? What no one wants to admit is that you cannot produce an avant-garde in a climate of fear.

Culture only moves forward if its practitioners don’t give a fuck. Until then, it will remain stuck.

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