The Brooklyn Rail

We never needed the horizon of the contemporary to know that art is in our midst. I can’t think of an artist who uses that language, since they are too busy forging new words and worlds. I have no doubt that experimental art/Black culture/performance/film/practice/… and advocating for such practice, and attending to the works and lives of artists, is happening. Study and advocacy will continue via the rejection of and infidelity to disciplines and norms, by dispersal, breaking, listening, sounding, embodying. By what techniques, I want to know, by what kinds of attention, including that of the non-visible (Fred Moten), by what actions of critique and language? These are fertile grounds, only partially formed and ever-transforming, but we know them when we see and hear them. The dishonesty of the past two decades is in our midst and is choking us. It’s a dishonesty about what contemporary visual art (studio), art history, and art criticism were made from: white on black dispossession and violence in the formation of liberal freedom, and subjects which can’t be free or subjects—we don’t want that kind of freedom or that kind of subject. Some choose to hold the noose still, thinking they will stay in (fantasized) power that way. There is more ledgering in a newer set of categories and names for placing those who do this work in professional containers, many unrecognized by the art field and global institutions. The auction is the contemporary (Cameron Rowland). Property is now weaponized slightly differently by the auction houses, advisors, merchants, and appraisers into a recognized area of luxury investment. This ledger holds that contemporary art’s purpose is to accrue market value. The contemporary has quantitatively been the fastest expanding area of value in the global art market. The “anemic” horizon of a freedom (Saidiya Hartman), not understood as racist order but a liberal one, birthed the fundamentals of art history and art criticism’s judgments and categories: the formal analysis of objects within an order of the visible, and taste, organized by dating/chronology and comparative analysis (whose practice gets considered as art?). Let’s end this patterning and personification of objects and lives through art products. Lives are larger than this. Practice and many of its traces elude such capture. We know that art is in our midst.