Reading Dean Kissick

Unpacking a lament for the good ol' days of self-indulgent art

There’s been a lot of discussion about Dean Kissick’s December cover story for Harper’s Magazine, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art”. It seems to be a lament for art that was about art for its own sake, for pushing boundaries simply because it could. Kissick makes the case for art for the self-involved.

He notes early in the essay that, “​​Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.”

He adds:

The ambition to explore every facet of the present was quickly replaced by a devout commitment to questions of equity and accountability. There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn't do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting.

Huh? Does he even get out much? In NYC alone, there are roughly 1,400 galleries. Is he seriously suggesting that there’s not a broad range of artistic styles, approaches, interests, and ideas being presented?

An example of the heights from which art has fallen is German artist Carsten Höller’s Soma (2010), in which participants were offered the chance to drink the urine of reindeer that were fed hallucinogenic mushrooms. Yeah, you read that right: Reindeer urine. Bottom’s up!

Kissick cites the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s as art’s heyday when, unlike today, artists were more concerned with a multiplicity of ideas, not just identity.

The art of the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s was pluralist in its intentions, forms, and subjects. Contemporary art took in such miscellaneous concerns as literature and poetry, avant-garde dance, theater, cinema, broadcast television, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, politics, noise music, pornography, pole dancing, online abjection, ritual sacrifice, crucifixion, cannibalism, Thai cookouts, Zinedine Zidane playing a soccer match in Madrid, long-distance sailing, astronomy, industrial design, being a dog, biting people—everything. It could all be remade as art. The "contemporary" was eternally elusive, moving ever further away with artists in pursuit, an endless research project.

Kissick’s views were clearly shaped by his time as an intern for Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss curator, critic, and art historian, who has been the artistic director of the London’s Serpentine Galleries since 2006. In addition to his many artistic and curatorial achievements, Obrist was known as the “the curator who never sleeps”. Kissick talks about Obrist’s insistence that everything was “urgent” and that it was critical to connect people, ideas, and disciplines across the globe. Apparently, he was a whirlwind of activity, traveling globally nonstop and emailing from his two Blackberries constantly. For Kissick, Obrist exemplifies the focus on the contemporary that, in his mind, made the art world so invigorating.

Now, everyone, he claims, is concerned with the past.

Everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a tradition, however recent: Hellenistic Greek sculpture, the Roman cult of Adonis, ancient Nubian wedding ceremonies, Ancestral Pueblo pottery culture, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican song, Mapuche cosmology, Maya Tz'utujil weaving, Incan mythology, African mask-making and the early Cubist painting it inspired, Fifties Americana, the Sixties New Sacred Art Movement of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Eighties Beijing migrant-worker cruising culture, late-Aughts contemporary art, etc. Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present. We just long for different pasts.

Let’s pause for a moment. The push to include, highlight, and center, voices and perspectives from “marginalized” people came after ages of centering the creativity of mostly white European men. Their place in the canon is safe. The work now is to expand the canon so that what’s considered “the best” reflects a broad range of voices and perspectives. And, I’ll add, voices that are producing excellent work.

(L to R): Joana Choumali, You Can Live In My Arms; Alex Gardner, Chaos Bloom; Kandy G. Lopez, Kei Williams

Artists that come to mind include image-based artist Joana Choumali, painter Alex Gardner, and textile artist Kandy G. Lopez. All three had outstanding New York gallery shows this past year at Sperone Westwater, Perrotin, and ACA Galleries, respectively. All three shows were thrilling precisely because these artists produced visually stunning work that inspired and reinvigorated our spirits. We’re reminded of aspirations greater than our individual concerns. I’m not sure how anyone could’ve left these shows unmoved. In fact, many of us return to galleries every week precisely because we’re hoping to encounter work that has that effect on us.

America obstinately focuses on the future. We look at today and tomorrow with little concern for the past or what historical and cultural forces brought us to our present moments. But for much of the non-western world, there are deep and ancient traditions of respecting the past and seeking guidance from ancestors to move forward. From Ghana, for example, the Akan have given us the word Sankofa, which means learning from the past to inform the future. Japan’s Shinto religion is all about honoring ancestors.

And, dude, folks are trying to “escape the present” because the present is, for so many people, nasty and brutish: A live-streamed genocide that our government is determined to aid and abet. People financially ruined because of medical debt. Folks angry that many have simply said that Black lives matter, too. It’s dispiriting.

I can’t tell if Kissick is being snide or not when he notes, “At the Whitney Biennial in particular, many varieties of remixed neoindigeneity were on display.” He goes on to cite works of artists such as Rose B. Simpson, whose work consisted of “life-size female figures made in the Pueblo ceramics tradition practiced by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. The statues were adorned with twine, lava bead, oshá root, and hide, and covered in mysterious painted symbols: pluses, diagonal crosses, columns of dashes, and spirals.”

Of the adornments, his conclusion is this: “They are talismans that protect against the present.”

It seems lost on him that many people are experiencing the present as varying levels of violence. I can only think of one group that historically hasn’t needed protection against the present. But, given the current disaffection of white men, they could use some help, too.

Kissick displays a cultural myopia and a disdain for identities and concerns beyond the the Eurocentric. Later in the piece, he writes: “When the world's most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority.” This is nonsense. A 2019 study found that museum collections were 85% white and 87% male, and there’s no reason to believe there’s been a significant shift since then. Just because museums have made up for historical oversights with exhibitions that highlight some Black, brown, or queer artists doesn't change the material conditions in the communities those artists came from.

He even has the temerity to write this: “In a world with Foreigners Everywhere (the theme of the 2024 Venice Biennale), differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief.”

Newsflash: The "universal grief" many are dealing with are the triple ravages of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.

The persistence of white supremacy and patriarchy has made the lives of the global majority inherently political. More importantly, from the 90s onward, we’ve seen artists and scholars pushing back not only against the inclusion of work and practices that have been overlooked, but work that gatekeepers told artists simply wasn’t important. Much of this has been a reclamation of these traditions and an effort to create space in the canon for them to exist alongside “classic” Western approaches, traditions, and frameworks.

Currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami are two thrilling exhibitions that underscore this point. The first is Andrea Chung’s “Between Too Late and Too Early,” which uses the Caribbean’s history of slavery and colonialism as a means of exploring its present challenges with climate change and the tourism industry. One of the highlights of the exhibit was work in which she took ads for Caribbean tourism, and removed the Black people. What we’re left with are silhouettes of Black people alongside images of upscale White people enjoying themselves in ways the locals could not. Chung explores the ways that Caribbean identity was erased or forced into the background in order to support the comfort and leisure of white tourists. There was already a political angle at play. Chung brings it to the fore.

The second exhibit is Smita Sen’s “Embodied,” in which the artist explores how grief stays in the body. She uses multiple media to chart her journey to understanding various ailments she had in the wake of her father’s death, illnesses that Western medicine couldn’t explain. She also engages with her late father’s geological work, as a means of coming to terms with his passing.

From the exhibits, we are reminded of how places of beauty can be sites of extractive industry. How can we think and behave differently about our notions of travel and what it means to be a guest in someone else’s country? And we’ve all had our bouts of grief and experiences of loss. What lessons and comfort can we take from how an artist processed her own grief? And how could anyone leave the museum and not be moved by the emotions and ideas emanating from these two exhibits?

Kissick considers people drinking hallucinogenic reindeer urine as one of art’s high water marks.

There’s a reactionary exasperation running throughout Kissick’s article. His certitude reflects an inability to see things from a perspective that’s not like his. Why was he so undone by the Venice Biennale, which was, for the first time, curated by a Latin American who lives in the Southern Hemisphere? As we enter what may well be an age of American fascism, this becomes the perfect article to kick off the era. Kissick wants a return to individualism, free from the weight of “identity” and social justice politics. In so many words, he’s arguing for a reassertion of normative whiteness.

We don’t know exactly what the world will look like after next month’s inauguration. But we have to expect a focused and widespread assault on decency, empathy, and compassion. Populating our highest levels of government will be people who cynically pollute the public square and want us to believe it’s everyone for themselves. Those who have the most narrow views of citizenship and society will have the power of the state behind them. And so we must fight back with the lessons and inspiration we glean from our many ancient traditions and collective histories. We resist not by creating work that has self-satisfaction as its end, but by leaning into work that can build pathways to understanding our shared human condition.

Kissick seems to want a return to art as a self-involved, individual intellectual exercise. And in some respects, he may get his wish. But we must do better. We have to remember that this moment calls for work that isn’t masturbatory (just because you can and it feels good for you), but work that does exactly what great art is supposed to do: Inspire wonder, intellectual and emotional engagement, connection, and, dare I say it, community.

Art for any other purpose is selfish.