I find the sculptures of Nairy Baghramian, the videos of Stan Douglas and the environments of Pierre Huyghe to be artistic achievements of the highest caliber; I think Ali Smith is writing novels of tremendous immediacy; I believe “Transit” and “Drive My Car” reaffirm the vitality of cinema; I love South African amapiano and Korean soap operas and Ukrainian electronic music.
“It’s still one Earth,” the novelist Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one unmediated plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to distinguish.
In fact, the sampling techniques pioneered in hip-hop and, later, electronic dance music — once done with piles of records, now with folders of WAV files — have trickled down into photography, painting, literature and lower forms like memes, all of which now present a hyperreferentialism that sets them slightly apart from the last century’s efforts.
(Kerstin Brätsch, one of the smartest abstract painters working today, has acknowledged that any mark she makes is “not empty anymore but loaded with historical reference.”) Consider last year’s hit “Creepin’,” by The Weeknd: a 2022 rejigger of the 2004 Mario Winans song “I Don’t Wanna Know” with no meaningful change in instrumentation in the nearly two intervening decades.
Trapped on a modernist game board where there are no more moves to make, a growing number of young artists essentially pivoted to political activism — plant a tree and call it a sculpture — while others leaned hard into absurdity to try to express the sense of digital disorientation.
This institutional hunger for novelty combined with digital requirements for communicability may help explain why so much recently celebrated American culture has taken such conservative, traditionalist forms: oil portraiture, Iowa-vintage coming-of-age novels, biopics, operettas barely distinguishable from musical theater.
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