Brooks on Contemporary Art

Torey Thornton, “There’s Solid Militia Fashion, but Come On, Domestic Like Focus Always”, via Buffalo News, whose critic didn't like the artist's 2016 debut show much, but I like this one a lot.

So two Manhattan contemporary art curators (Jewish Museum and Whitney), two New York–based conceptual artists, and a Brooklyn-based painter, Torey Thornton, walk into a bar. No, really, they walk into the New York Times newsroom, equipped with their lists of ten "works of art that define the contemporary age", toward the project of compiling a master list of 25 in a couple of hours for the Times's style magazine, T, and

Unsurprisingly, the system fell apart. It was impossible, some argued, to rank art. It was also impossible to select just 10. (Rosler, in fact, objected to the whole premise, though she brought her own list to the discussion in the end.)... this list of works is merely what has been culled from the conversation, each chosen because it appeared on a panelist’s original submission of 10 (in two instances, two different works by the same artist were nominated, which were considered jointly). The below is not definitive, nor is it comprehensive. Had this meeting happened on a different day, with a different group, the results would have been different.

Also there were hardly any paintings, sculptures, or works on paper, and hardly any of the artists were very famous (or famous in peculiar and tendentious ways, including Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons but rejecting Gerhard Richter), leading world-famous art critic David Brooks ("Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?") to lament

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded.... Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.

Which might have some point to it, notwithstanding the clichés in which it's expressed, were it not for the fact that this is T magazine ffs, from the Times style department, and represents the actual art world no more than that recipe for guacamole with peas represented contemporary gastronomy.

That's all I wanted to say, really; this is just a "Why I Hate The New York Times" joke with a double punchline: T did something this silly and insular, and Brooks took it seriously and got his knickers in an 800-word twist over the dreadful implications of this phenomenon growing largely out of his accidental encounter with the Whitney aesthetic of which Peter Schjeldahl wrote (re this year's biennial),

The show is about many things, but the irresponsible joy of aesthetic experience is only fitfully one of them. Nearly all the artists are technically adept in mediums that include photography, video, and performance, as well as painting and sculpture, but most of the work, though charming at times, is derivative in form, recycling modes that would not surprise any art-school student of the past quarter century. 

and no more experience than that, except for his own solemn preoccupations with "larger truths about the human condition" (irresponsible joy is definitely more my style).

And to add that there are probably dozens of summary lists defining contemporary art that have plenty of room for painting, sculpture, and emotion, like this one from the online dealer Artsy, from 2017, which includes the following:

Andreas Gursky, Rhine II (12' by 7' photograph, 1999).

Rachel Harrison, Huffy Howler, 2004. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis .

Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014.  This piece also appears in the T magazine list of 25, though their photo doesn't give nearly as clear an idea of its scale and splendor as this one does.