Erudite take on contemporary creative culture by NY Times art critic - should interest @almondbiscuit @AnAussie, @Susannah and a few others It’s behind a paywall, but non-subscribers can read several articles a month for free. If anyone has difficult I’ll put it in a different format, but later cos I’m cooking dinner right now - sauté de veau with cepes, pumpkin and chestnuts - must be autumn!,
Edit -probs with original link - so thanks to @Porridge for the link below
It sounds very interesting but that link doesn’t work for me…
Thanks for that
Mmmm…. Bit long winded but seems to add to a current conversation about art culture becoming stale and devoid of innovation
good art is good because it is innovative, and that an ambitious writer, composer, director or choreographer should not make things too much like what others have made before
With fast advancing new techniques and technology, plus lightning fast unchained and unedited popular opinion, everyone’s a critic. Repetition is popular. Popular makes money.
Few are creators. In many ways, it seems ‘safer’ to just repeat time approved formats. Sequel movies. Rap, literally repeated words. Haute couture re evoking earlier modes. And ‘hommage’ art.
Edouard Manet also lived in interesting times. Industrialisation was rewriting society. I can fully understand and empathise with how he took to the wood block art arriving in Europe from Japan. The people’s art. He lifted from it colour blocking and outlining, but his idea of elevating ordinary folk in their real ordinary lives into his paintings was nothing short of revolutionary.
Is it possible that we as humankind collectively became too lazy and self satisfied to create and originate? Unfortunately, history has taught us that from turmoil and disaster the seeds of great artistic change occurs. Plenty of that today.
I’m out of touch with the art world but I do wonder if and who and where the torch bearers are now. What I do know for sure is that there will be a flowering. Eventually.
It’s a big, very wide ranging article and I’m only really qualified to write a response to Farrago(!) in the context of some areas of visual culture.
In fine art relational aesthetics has been around for several decades but isn’t mentioned because - understandably for a NYC art critic, the emphasis is on forms of commercial gallery-based art. Whereas, for me the most interesting art of recent decades has come from China and sub-Saharan Africa. The Chinese art was interesting because it drew on local tradition to generate a non-Western response to a very ancient culture’s rapid transition into historical modernity. Unfortunately, I think the artistic response to that has now peaked, or become exhausted, or repressed, or all three.
By contrast in Africa one saw a very different fusion of very local traditions and burgeoning historical modernity. But in a way neither the Chinese nor African phenomena were ‘new’ or ‘revolutionary’ instead they were the addition of non-Western voices to the existing art milieu, but perhaps the art only differed because it reflected different societies.
Farrago described how Manet marked the beginning of a shift from the perpetual relay of the classical tradition and values through the teaching in art academies, to the avant garde’s rejection of what had gone before in favour of something new that (ostensibly) owed nothing to the past, but of course was really part of a continuum.
Overall I agree with most of his account apart from his brief reflection on design where he refers to people buying 'modernist antiques. Whilst it is true these have become popular (and more affordable in repro) if one looks at contemporary furniture design and production there’s a lot of new and exciting things happening and I don’t think that is close to exhaustion. The central argument in my next book is that in the mid decades of the C20th the traditional values of academically classical female beauty passed into modernist biomorphic design (lots of reasons why!) and for me, because of their relationship to evolving technologies and materials, rather than being so-image centric, design and architecture continue to be the most exciting areas of visual culture,
And now I go watch international football on TV - got to maintain a balance with the theoretical stuff…
Before you go……
I like the trend of ‘upcycling’ interior furnishings. May not be art but it is often creative, deft workmanship and original by design.
Perhaps this what we should laud. Creative people making the planet more sustainable while making it useful. And attractive.
Yay up-cycling from Japan!
Sashiko is how I repair most textiles 
This you may like
Patchwork can be so full of meaning.
That’s the art world for you. 