the whirling gyre

how scenes form, sell-out, and move on

To some extent the avant-garde has always been self-selected. No one stumbles into a revolutionary art movement. No one anoints you to anticipate the future. And yet, the historical avant-gardes—the cubists, the futurists, the dadaists, the constructivists, the surrealists—were to some extent anointed. Firstly by their peers, as these were to some extent clubs, in which peer approval was essential to membership and secondly by institutions. What would these groupings mean without the art historical perspective of museums such as MoMA?

Today the avant-garde is a series of interlocking scenes. They do not drive culture so much as embody it. They serve less as a guide, more as a tangent. "Membership"—if that is the correct word—is about adjacency.

To give a recent example, there was never an inner sanctum in Dimes Square. You just showed up. To Clandestino. To The River. To Sovereign House. Peer approval doesn’t seem to matter much either. Being enemies is at least as important as being friends in the downtown crab bucket. Furthermore, with social media, it doesn’t take much effort to make an enemy in the first place. In the past, you needed to know someone to hate them. Now beefs happen between people who wouldn’t recognize each other in passing on the street, who could care less about what that person thinks or makes, if they make anything at all. These beefs are less about creative competition and more driven by game-of-telephone gossip and catty cliquishness.

As for retrospective anointment, does a condescending comment by Jack Antonoff in The Face count?