The Brooklyn Rail

One hundred years ago, the world saw published Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s tender Mrs. Dalloway, and Hitler’s (no words here) Mein Kampf. Charlie Chaplin released The Gold Rush and Sergei Eisenstein showed Battleship Potemkin, but let’s not forget Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ or The Big Parade, an influential film about WWI, both appearing to much acclaim. The New Yorker launched. The Grand Ole Opry started broadcasting. I don’t like all these cultural texts, but their influence continues to percolate and history helps temper my frustrations with the present.

This year ended with much ado about another historic moment 110 years ago and an exhibition known as 0,10, a name applied to the new digital sector of Art Basel Miami Beach. That 1915 exhibition did not define the Russian avant-garde except in particular (mis)tellings of that moment. Like any avant-garde, it wasn’t one but many. Splinter groups and rivalries lay treacherous ground for any current participant, let alone a critic or curator years later hoping for a smooth trajectory to the contemporary.

The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10, widely known for establishing Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist ambitions, involved another lauded figure, Vladimir Tatlin. Those two came to literal blows during the organizational effort and had to be physically separated and restrained from the desire to pummel each other. The other twelve artists in the show were forced to pick sides. The two groups were separated, and Tatlin willingly posted a sign on the entry to his room stating “Exhibition of Professional Painters” to distinguish his vision from the reprobate productions he spurned. Malevich overwhelmed the show’s creative display with thirty-nine works—a third the number of his cohort, three times the number that Tatlin showed, an equal number to all the works in Tatlin’s group. Quantity, quality… sometimes history has a hard time distinguishing. Malevich also wrote a lot about his work, his ideas, his vision, with others sidelined by his account. As Linda Boersma recounts (see the linked footnote to her book here), neither group offered a similar and consistent style, and yet the -isms roll down the ages, smoothing the differences that generated much at the time.

Malevich challenged artistic conventions, but so did Tatlin with his radical “counter-relief” assemblages. Narratives suggest one turned inward towards self-reference, while the other faced outward in reconfiguring the world. Whether artists situate themselves in one legacy or another, the debate remains tense about making art from or about the self (spiritually or psychologically) versus in and for the world (politically or ecologically). Whether one approach is better than the other, or more significant, depends on the moment.

I mention all this because it’s so easy to flatten history into opportunistic origin stories. The messy work of sorting through the past is never so pat. I’m vaguely amused by the belligerence of such famed figures, and it helps me resist the internal rage at asinine declarations about art in the present.

There is so much terrible art. Beyond the assortment circumnavigating the globe propelled by art fair season, the holiday photo cards circulating in the mail wear at my joie de vivre—what I have left of it, at the end of this awful year. So many happy smiling families bring Leo Tolstoy to mind. The best images are the worst, from any critical standard. Contrived. Trite. But that’s not why we look at the (now increasingly rare) printed photos framed with some heartfelt greeting, is it?

There is so much boring art. Redundant. Flat. Self-evident. Sometimes it is so bad, it achieves a weird ironic joy for those of us trapped by generational cynicism compounded by middle age. Most of the time, though, it is just bad.

But when it’s good…

Occasionally, some thing hits. Perhaps for being just the right amount of caffeinated, or the light streaming through the window in just the right way, or seeing something after a tiring day… this thing resonates. For lack of a better word, we call it art. And once that happens, all hell breaks loose in debates, denials, diatribes, on platforms and panels, in texts and at institutions, for profit or not.

What we are talking about can present in so many different forms. Despite the semblance that collectors, critics, or curators have a fetishistic attachment to one medium, I have yet to encounter anyone who truly rejects all media to the exclusion of that one and only. A painting, a photograph, a mosaic, a sculpture, a marked site, a ruin, a tapestry, a film, a portrait, a landscape, a word, a carving, a brushstroke, a pixel tumbling across a screen and landing somewhere between the mind’s eye and a dumbstruck heart.

Why people should then open their mouths and defame one practice or another does a disservice to the encounter with art, which in its ambiguity would seem to encourage a more subtle awareness of uncertainty and possibility. I’ve seen marketing on social media with more soul than some things in galleries, but I’m hardly about to embrace the entire advertising industry in lieu of visual art.

In the last year, I have listened to photography wail in its own defense as if the medium itself weren’t so varied that the work of a yearbook photographer differs from that of paparazzi from that of Cindy Sherman or Laurie Simmons or Martha Rosler. Daguerreotypes, lucigraphs, and cyanotypes were all subsumed under the term photograph. In 1925, Leica introduced the small 35 mm format camera and Anatol Josepho offered eight sepia photos for a quarter with the Photomaton (first automated photo booth) in NYC, which some believe democratized portrait photography—others might say it cheapened it.

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s VideoSculpture XX (The World’s 6th Sense) (2019) and Stephanie Syjuco’s Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime) (2016) were both in the Meridians section (associated with large-scale works), but the image culture associated with photography is crucial to either; both artists are dealing with digital culture so were aptly situated on the border of the fair’s digital art sector, Zero 10, where works like Michael Kozlowski’s Tessellations (2025) looked more like traditional sculpture or painting—until one got close enough to see the artist’s invocation of circuit boards, algorithmic patterns in architectural and textile designs, and the power coursing through these aesthetic genealogies.

My point is that all art today seems to be in an expanded field. When Robert Morris proposed the term in 1946 to consider three-dimensional practices beyond the white cube gallery, he wanted more sculpture, not less. I sit with a sculpture in ways that I don’t with a photograph, and I react to photographs in ways that sculpture doesn’t compel, but I need both to understand and appreciate a lot of work being made today. Investigating one discipline through the lens of another offers opportunities, but too often develops into tribal partitions.

Yes, there is a lot of terrible art, but it isn’t limited to a genre, a medium, an era, or a practice. I struggled with tapestry, quilts, fabric works of all sorts, until I read about practices documented by WPA (Works Progress Administration) archivists in the 1930s, the techniques behind kimonos, the global supply routes that dump shipping containers’ worth of fast fashion onto the shores of Ghana; I came to admire material culture for having trained myself to see how the threads come together.

I love landscapes except for all the ones that muddy the genre’s field of possibility in their crap coloration. I don’t like portrait paintings, except for all the ones that surpass that genre restriction. Sometimes, I just want to laugh at the tender lines of a drawing. I look, stare, notice, watch, feel, fumble, stumble, and reason in my encounters with art.

This year, I found a wistful humor and therefore solace in Marina Zurkow’s The River is a Circle (2025) at the Whitney (on view through January 11th), but also appreciated the clever sharpness of Xin Liu’s The Permanent and the Insatiable at Management last spring. I don’t like opera but enormously enjoyed Jake Elwes’s Terms & Conditions Opera: A Legalese Libretto, OpenAI Usage Policies (2024–25) (on view at Gazelli until December 19). Immersed in The Memory of Folds (2025) by Gábor Kitzinger made me feel the effects of deconstruction on the story of art, while standing alone in the hexagonal space at CODE in Hungary. I was thrilled to see the mini-retrospective of Analivia Cordeiro at bitforms (on view until January 6) and Offline Gallery’s display of Ego in the Shell by Emi Kusano in October. I have yet to be disappointed by the exhibitions organized by Heft Gallery, a new space in NYC.

And art doesn’t need to be great (whatever that might be) to do the thing you need or want at that particular moment. I enjoyed the Sora showcase last winter, mostly because seeing the variety of works made evident how educational, professional, and cultural backgrounds informed what each produced using the AI video generator; it’s not all the same or for the same purpose. No art is.

Despite the art market enthusiasm this fall, the politics this year made explicit the limitations art will face. When much is working against us, we might notice our common ground.

Come all you faithless, you metalheads and cultural Marxists, you climate scientists and abortion docs, you Buddhists and Muslims and devotees of many-armed goddesses, and of course you Jews too, can’t forget the OGs, the queers and pinkos right alongside ya, yes and you UFO buffs and feminist podcasters and porn stars, you Open Society wonks, YA fantasy writers, and DEI managers, you trans boys and girls, and transhumanists too, wireheads and Burners and AI overlords, you Hollywood stars and yoga teachers and R&B pop stars flashing pyramid signs, not to mention you actual Satanists and Freemasons and witches and heathens, and how could we skip you critical race studies adjuncts and Procter & Gamble execs, and of course you Darwinists and antifa punks and gay priests, all of you now, all of us, let us take a moment here amidst our variant identities and discords to acknowledge our shared humanity — or rather the shared subhumanity we assume before the jabbing fingers of literally millions of rightwing Christians in America, who have identified us all, at least at one time or another, as, if not directly possessed by devils and demonic forces, then at the very least in thrall to them, whether we know it or not.

That passage—courtesy of the ever brilliant Erik Davis, the author of TechGnosis (1998/2015), a book I cannot recommend enough—seems like an apt holiday conclusion to a fraught year. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. May it be a hearth fire for us all.