I began toiling over my writing, organizing it like a marketing calendar— the same structure that had plagued my psyche since entering the commercial art business. I had been smeared and celebrated in tandem. I had loved artists, been betrayed by them, helped them, and ultimately failed them, all within the same anxiety-induced yelp of bearing witness, collapsing before the horizon of my womanhood. Before I even recognized I had a spirit, tethered to something beyond my own self-perceived utility.
I was outraged. Then, I became unfazed. The art world lacked intellect, lacked criticality.
The listicles. The buyer’s market. Dull. Unimaginative. The essence of art muted and shrouded as bets were hedged on young, impressionable artists entering the Yale School of Art. The barometer, the formula, the risk-averse calculus. Hollow promises echoed through gilded halls, promising fortune and recognition. Well-dressed impersonators and commandeers of the upper class flocked to the excavation sites of open studios, from Rhode Island onward, mapping a course to etch themselves into history or cash in on the naivety of a market beholden to the old world, grifted from the top down.
My phone buzzed. The best exhibition this year. The cutting-edge emerging gallery. Another closing in droves. Art journalism becomes criticism. Every artist becomes the next big thing. A glossy article, bold type, affirming the climb to the top, which ends at the Chiltern Firehouse with an heiress on coke, telling you she donates to Africa. Her eyes glossed over, unimpressed but mesmerized by your resistance.
No one can read a painting. Everyone can paint.
My father’s words haunt me as we walk through the labyrinth of the Art Institute of Chicago. ‘I could do this,’ he says, gripping a copy of Crime and Punishment, a book that has spent years collecting dust and roach carcasses, propped on the stool in our NYCHA apartment bathroom. A place where my body can only recount atrocities.
My first hater! A karmic adversary of the female mystic. Richter once said he could see it in all women who painted, rambling on that dusty couch at Three Kings in Basel, Switzerland, as the room swelled with the scent of scotch. Men in blue suits, no ties, soaking up the reverence of power.
The mirage of community is fixed to an algorithm, monitored by Meta. Anxiety itching beneath the surface. The endless need for acknowledgment, for labor to be seen. Desperation to make a living from art, still clinging to the collegiate art school scheme. $59,000 a year for an empty promise.
Now they bicker, shift blame. They glare at their peers who are praised, who have eclipsed their once-coveted art darling status. They have met all their idols and are disillusioned. The studio becomes a factory. Their work is auctioned off to fatten the wallets of patrons they once revered.
Maybe I should go on a reality TV show. Maybe I should date an actor. Maybe I should fuck that dealer who keeps grabbing my ass at openings.
These are not unique circumstances. They are archaic. But something still doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s that the art world isn’t about art at all. It’s just another scheme for the lustful and aimless to seek ivory towers to protect their delusions of grandeur. Speak the truth too loudly, advocate for the unseen, and you are blacklisted, paraded through the town square, lynched and prodded to protect the fragile egos of the bourgeoisie.
The academy dissolves seamlessly as art historians canonize transgressions as antithetical to progression. Art is an afterthought. Artists steal from each other through digital surveillance, working side by side but never meeting IRL. Commerce is king. Art is just another racket to cement one’s place in cultural consciousness, devoid of statement, bloated with infantilized self-importance. Connection is hollow, feigned for an audience that only exists online. Emotion is absent. Manipulation is a skill, rewarded and praised.
In the words of Frank J. Miles: Our intimacies are our desires…
And therefore our politics.
Everyone wants to be an artist, but art is a carcass. Former revelations no longer inspire; they simply affirm placement within the hierarchy of domination. We meditate on the rigor, the transcendence of art that cuts through the noise, that acts as a conduit to the unknown. But we are drowning in posturing. Parodies of masters reign supreme. The quest for truth is disregarded, seen as an adversary to a cult addicted to its own capitalist gains.
A battered woman runs to Monet’s Haystacks and weeps. An impoverished teen finds wonder in Caravaggio without knowing his full story. And I stand idle, wayward, in the shadow of Isa Genzken’s brutalist pillars, perched on steel sprayed with the smirk of Düsseldorf.
Material is semiotic to experience. The stage has become too wide, too intricate, to see what the fuck is going on.
But I am bitter. I am harmed. I am mocked. So I am probably not in the best headspace to make this announcement.
Still, I qualify as someone who can point at a problem, unburdened by the structures that confine and imprison my contemporaries, who remain dependent on the gallery and fair system.
I wouldn’t say art is dead. Maybe it’s on its last breath before AI wipes it out, before the technocrats turn museums into kaleidoscopes, accessible from a nanochip in our brains. Manufactured by X Musk, short for X AE A-Xii, the spawn of Elon Musk and the pastel-coded, 2010s manic pixie dream girl, It Girl Grimes.
For every Marvel sequel inspired juggernaut over-saturated blue-chip artist group exhibition, for every emerging artist who can’t stretch their own canvas, disillusioned white men sit in the corner, relapsing into their performative alcoholism. The extinction clock inches toward midnight.
There are artists who still make art. Camille Henrot and Catalina Ouyang come to mind, but they are both known as sculptors, women who may be on a proverbial quest for atonement. Maybe I am biased, too damned by my own womanhood to call them the only ones who make art.
Sometimes I think of Wangechi Mutu throwing black goop on a white canvas in a white cube. But I have my own neurosis about black femme rage, only accepted when manicured.
I guess I am leaving men out.
Because I am biased. Because I think men are shackled to their own ego, their performance of competency.
I want to see men cry. Bare all. Without sacrificing the form of women to muse upon their desires. That’s how you breed a generation of serial killers, rapists, and comedians.
Then there’s Piper, who figured it all out decades ago, who hopped on a flight to Berlin, cradling her books, penciled with notes and scratches, damned to exile. Andrea Fraser, too. She figured it all too soon, and now her name lingers in the air, buzzing with aloofness and fear.
So art is alive.
But it is muddled.
It is eclipsed by billion-dollar fairs that demand assimilation. By collectors who only want replications of their auction-breaking acquisitions. By the desperation of a generation forced to comply with the death cult of late capitalism, waiting for affirmation, turning to cannibalism to survive.
But in the end, I was called a fraud.