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“Unless and until such a shift occurs, simply giving up the term or changing it out for a new one is not going to do much good. Swapping word games for a meaningful relationship to political reality was part of the problem in the first place.”

Although I disagree with a lot of what Davis has to say, this is where he hits the nail on the head. As long as we keep referring to ourselves as within the historical narrative, we will remain in the historical narrative. It’s over, we’re not on a track like Modernism suggested, and it’s still playing into those ideas to be ‘postmodern.’

“Harvey was talking about economic theory, but you could say the same about art theory: If the art world continues to recycle the same old anti-historic academic bullshit and chirpy gossip then it is going to continue to be a place of intellectual irrelevance and triviality that no one takes seriously besides the people who inhabit it.”

I would argue the opposite: the art world continues to recycle the same academic historical tropes in an attempt to seem relevant to a culture that doesn’t care or work the same way any more. As far as I know, no one’s complaining that contemporary artists are being too down-to-earth.

For an article appearing on “artnet” Davis’ analysis reads like “printnet,” circa 1995. He doesn’t mention the internet once, or any of the social or artistic changes brought about by techno-culture. He is thus the perfect critic for the current art world, still talking about storefront installations and such. For some reason the art critic’s association AICA included him in their recent panel on new media. Paddy was on the panel and from her description, Davis didn’t have much to say. “Techno-culture” may not in fact have rocked the ongoing neoliberal nightmare he describes in his essay, but many positive and interesting changes have occurred. It may be artists have drifted away from “his” art world and he’s wondering where all the energy went.

For an article appearing on “artnet” Davis’ analysis reads like “printnet,” circa 1995. He doesn’t mention the internet once, or any of the social or artistic changes brought about by techno-culture. He is thus the perfect critic for the current art world, still talking about storefront installations and such. For some reason the art critic’s association AICA included him in their recent panel on new media. Paddy was on the panel and from her description, Davis didn’t have much to say. “Techno-culture” may not in fact have rocked the ongoing neoliberal nightmare he describes in his essay, but many positive and interesting changes have occurred. It may be artists have drifted away from “his” art world and he’s wondering where all the energy went.

@Tom: The internet! Savior of art and mankind! Well, we’ll see about that. In the meantime, Davis’s linking of postmodernism to the economic and political climate as it exists now, on Planet Reality, is spot on. You think the internet is going to change all that? Maybe you should take a trip out to Peter Brandt’s place in CT, and check out the Urs Fischer show.

Howard, I received your letter and greatly appreciate your taking the time to write and spend a few shillings on postage for yr humble svt. I did not in fact make it to Brandt’s to see the recreated excavation (couldn’t get a carriage out to Greenwich) but I trust you found the day trip pleasant (and possibly got some shooting in). I have always enjoyed Mr. Matta Clark’s work so I’m sure it was grand.

Engaging in “word games” and engaging in “a meaningful relationship to political reality” doesn’t have to be an either-or matter — these aren’t mutually-exclusive strategies.

I’m not sure that one couldn’t invoke a soaring pessimistic worldview from any point in history and present it as a kind of extended truism. Davis’ article had me nodding my head (“how right he is!”, then feeling guilty (“oh shit… I’m implicated”), before remembering that ANY conversation about “postmodernism” seems to bifurcate into two camps: those who interpret its sloppy pastiche as liberating, and those who interpret it as further evidence of a decadent, wayward culture.

Yes, it’s significant that Davis sidesteps any mention of the internet, that sprawling, rhizomatic cyber-system that was first employed as a war tool (see: “political reality”) before becoming available for most civilians to shuffle image-music-text however they see fit (see: “word games”). I prefer the latter incarnation of the internet (which, for all of its shortcomings, embodies “postmodernist” rhetoric better than any classroom debate) than its original deployment on “Planet Reality.”

@Howard Halle: There’s a way to say you think Tom Moody places emphasis on the Internet at the expense of discussing the merits of piece without telling him he’s from another planet. We all have to work to find diplomacy with certain commentors, but it’s worth the effort. Both you and Moody offer some of the most valuable comments published on this site. I don’t want the discussions damaged by bickering.

@Tom Moody: I know it’s hard, but you really don’t have to respond to every bit of comment bait Howard throws out.

Paddy, my experience with comment bait is that it can give you an opportunity to further your point. In this case, I’m asking Howard how a Matta-Clark clone is supposed to draw us back from planet unreality. Or if we’re not supposed to go out to Brant’s to see it, why it’s worth mentioning. I don’t think I missed the merits of Davis’ piece–it’s a great, if dated, summary of the art world’s relation to politics. Like Jesse, I think it’s significant that Davis “sidestepped the internet.” Some think it has been fairly effective as a political organizing tool, vehicle to critique print media, etc.

well, I thought I was being more jocular than rude, but my apologies if I offended anyone.

I made the allusion to Brandt and the Fischer show because I think that exhibition, and the relationship between the artist and the collector it represents, illuminates the entrenchment of the postmodern power structure as laid out in Davis’s piece.

I think Ben sidestepped the issue of internet, possibly because he doesn’t see it as an avenue to bring about change in this respect. He would have to speak for himself on that score, of course, but it’s what I got out of the omission— probably because I personally don’t see the internet substantially transforming the conditions of postmodernism as Davis describes them, at least not yet.

Fischer is arguably a good example of why this is so. His New Museum show got hammered, not just in the print media, but online. If his career were a Broadway play, it would have closed. It didn’t, because his investors don’t rely on ticket sales to make their money back, but rather on a rigged marketplace that works in their favor.

Fischer himself, in fact, used the internet to shore up his otherwise untenable career, telling Art + Auction, that the New Mu show sucked not because he’s a mere pasticheur—-to use a favorite phrase of Tom’s—-of Postminimalist tropes, but because the New Mu as a building sucks! Now there’s a meme.

So Tom, if you feel that Davis’s political read is outdated, perhaps you could offer us a more current one. Just don’t rely on the old “teh interwebs elected Obama” thing, because as we’ve seen in the last year and half, the President’s abilities to act, while not completely unsuccessful, have certainly been hemmed in by the entrenched power structure as it exist on that patch of Planet Reality called Washington, D.C. And this despite the web-enabled tidal wave that sent him to the White House.

Davis’s point is that the same situation obtains for art and for cultural conditions in general. And he is, in my view, totally right.

A while back Paddy, I, and various commenters hashed over a lecture by Boris Groys at SVA called “Everyone is an Artist.” The title annoyed me but it turned out to be something I really liked. I present this as my own possible misreading of Groys. Rome, city-states, etc don’t fall because armies storm the barricades, they fall because people get interested in other things and drift away from the permanent siege of the city gates. The most interesting thing happening at the NewMu isn’t the latest Gavin Brown offering to curators incapable of doing their own homework, it’s Rhizome.org, the homely stepchild no one at the museum knows what to do with. And not just Rhizome per se, but the hundreds of artists and sites and projects they link to and discuss. There is a hardy band of commenters at Rhizome who still struggle to fold their work into the “discourse” that Ben Davis describes in such detail and that has as its apex Urs Fischer. Many, more have walked away from the whole schmear because it’s rigged, incomprehensible, boring, and slow. As an artist and recovering critic, I have had a much better time investigating the 1s and 0s realm and the problems of how it might be represented in public space (including gallery space) than I was having writing for the slicks covering the New York scene in the ’90s. In the Amy Sillman discussion I noted that you opposed painting to Skin Fruit rather than a NewMu show with a cyber/internet/media component such as Unmonumental or YTJ–the latter would require the hard work of finding points of comparison between what are really completely different ways of thinking and working. Easier to just say “the net’s not there yet” and put it out of mind. Meanwhile artists drift away from the gladiatorial contest that you are professionally forced to cover.

Davis’ article is excellent in how it reassesses a particular brand of theory, and how the failings of this brand are due largely to how postmodernist strategies to re(con)figure politics/power-structures have been co-opted by those systems. Or, the revolutionary idealism of postmodernist thought has always been just another symptom (an academic side-effect)of the very systems it intended to critique in the first place.

Ultimately, Davis is proposing the need for a new operational logic (operating system?). Again, for him to not refer to the internet at all (though the manner in which he discusses Josephine Meckseper becomes a conversation about net artists, if you squint a little) reads as a telling omission, particularly given the forum/format his article appears under. Davis’ blind spot – intentional or otherwise – does reflect the trend for prominent (arts) print writers to give far more credence to the “schmear” than to other, new, and potentially more vital practices (like those occurring on “teh interwebs”). And to meaningfully engage with these migratory “energies” requires more than just a cursory glance into their thresholds. New-media artists/writers should be held to that same challenge, too, rather than just abandoning any obligation of engaging with a “gladiatorial contest” that they’ve deemed irrelevant.

Davis’ article is excellent in how it reassesses a particular brand of theory, and how the failings of this brand are due largely to how postmodernist strategies to re(con)figure politics/power-structures have been co-opted by those systems. Or, the revolutionary idealism of postmodernist thought has always been just another symptom (an academic side-effect)of the very systems it intended to critique in the first place.

Ultimately, Davis is proposing the need for a new operational logic (operating system?). Again, for him to not refer to the internet at all (though the manner in which he discusses Josephine Meckseper becomes a conversation about net artists, if you squint a little) reads as a telling omission, particularly given the forum/format his article appears under. Davis’ blind spot – intentional or otherwise – does reflect the trend for prominent (arts) print writers to give far more credence to the “schmear” than to other, new, and potentially more vital practices (like those occurring on “teh interwebs”). And to meaningfully engage with these migratory “energies” requires more than just a cursory glance into their thresholds. New-media artists/writers should be held to that same challenge, too, rather than just abandoning any obligation of engaging with a “gladiatorial contest” that they’ve deemed irrelevant.

I don’t doubt what you say about there being artists who’ve checked out of the game as it’s currently played, and that some of them are concentrating their efforts on the web. But in waving the flag for the internet, and being so quick to dismiss Davis’s analysis, I believe you’re choosing the trees over the forest.

What I’d like to see, personally, is a revolution in cultural values, not a decanting of old wine into new bottles. Furthermore, to the extent that it’s possible, I don’t see why old-media artists couldn’t be as effective in addressing that change as new-media acolytes. For every cyber-artist drifting away from the siege, there’s probably a painter or some such doing likewise. But as the whole discussion over Sillman suggests, you seem to foreclose anything that doesn’t involve technological innovation. I’d say the whole emphasis on means as opposed to ends is what’s gotten us into the place we’re in.

Heron of Alexandria created a steam engine in the First Century, but it went nowhere because slavery was still accepted as the norm; manpower was cheap and widely available. Rome itself wouldn’t fall for another 300 years, and Heron’s innovation wouldn’t take root until the end of the 18th century, after a period during which the empirical method supplanted the teachings of the Church. Values have to change before technology can do its work. That goes for today.

As far as covering the gladitorial contest, as you put it, yeah that’s right; it’s how I make a living. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get the bigger picture.

Somehow my statement on the Amy Sillman threads– “you’d think there would be more curiosity about the new tools, content, and problems-to-solve presented by omnipresent technology”–keeps getting translated into “You seem to foreclose anything that doesn’t involve technological innovation.” The statement I’ve had accompanying my blog since 2001 reads: “I’m amused by the lingering rhetoric of futurism–the Buck Rogers, ‘machines-will-change-our-lives’ spieling–that continues to surround digital production in our society. The computer is a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication…” It would be nice if someone would check out my writing before calling me a techno-booster.

Somehow my statement on the Amy Sillman threads– “you’d think there would be more curiosity about the new tools, content, and problems-to-solve presented by omnipresent technology”–keeps getting translated into “You seem to foreclose anything that doesn’t involve technological innovation.” The statement I’ve had accompanying my blog since 2001 reads: “I’m amused by the lingering rhetoric of futurism–the Buck Rogers, ‘machines-will-change-our-lives’ spieling–that continues to surround digital production in our society. The computer is a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication…” It would be nice if someone would check out my writing before calling me a techno-booster.