Sunday, November 30, 2008

“Feeling Blue”



Excerpts from a review of an exhibition at the New Museum in New York City, by Peter Schjeldahl.
(Italics mine.)
Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-dedizened biennials circuit (and this was before the crash)…
If the common run of contemporary art risks triviality in the pursuit of seduction, the new kind incurs hysteria as a toll of earnest intensity (I guess I'll take earnest hysteria over triviality)…
You suspect that a big change is coming when sensitive young people project (and, because they’re young, enjoy) feelings of being old… The syndrome announces the exhaustion of a received cultural situation, whose traditions are slack and whose future is opaque. It typically entails nostalgia for real or fancied past ages that dealt—successfully, in retrospect—with similar cases (referring to the World Wars)…
Religion—after a century and a half of modern movements that conceived one secular substitute after another—is very much at issue…
What we want now is a major artist—a Manet, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, or Beuys (notice, all men)—who will manifest durable truths at the core if inevitable hypes and hyperboles.

Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2008
work by Steve Walls

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