12. (bonus track) the mid-life crisis art memoir: enter dean kissick (2024)
I hear that Dean Kissick's essay for Harper’s Magazine, "The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art," is getting heated commentary online. I only heard this secondhand via an artist friend because I'm not on X or any of the places where reactionary commentary takes place, like Reddit. I'm here, and not here, on the passive, consumable, performative, and uncritical space of Instagram. The wrong audience I know, but there’s a more transparent ecology playing out on Instagram, no fight or reaction, just submission to the status quo, which I find critically interesting.
I listened to Kissick’s “protest” on the commute home on Safari, which has a good “read aloud” function, amounting to a 40-minute listen. I had never read Dean Kissick before, but this example of his writing is poor. It may be a case of the form following the confessional message. Writing quality aside, there are also weird asides, like his mother losing her legs on the way to a gallery and asking was the exhibition worth the loss, or the claim that once upon a time artists were “free and happy” and “sexually wanted”.
That said, what comes to mind when listening to Kissick is a lot of agreement. Especially as someone who is, like Kissick, middle-aged, looking at the artworld through nostalgia and a lot of unrealistic and unrealised ideologies about what the art scene (rather than amorphous artworld) was, could be, and isn't, or ever can be in reality, in art’s abject entanglement with class, money and competitive scarcity thus envy among artists.
Some British critics, like Dan Fox, have come out in recent years in their 40s bemoaning what has become of art and the artworld, as if at one point in their professional careers the artworld was everything to them—ideologically, radically, romantically, economically. But now, in their late 40s, with more time to reflect on what was and what if’s, they end up regretting their choice to be part of this thing called the artworld, when they could have drifted off into the wilderness and eaten some poisoned berries.
These art critics critically reflect on their artworld experiences in the royal blue and embossed white of Fitzcarraldo Editions, or Harper's Magazine in the case of Dean Kissick, which was once also packaged in blue and white. They are, in some ways, the privileged few who have engaged with contemporary art at its very centre. Kissick talks in great detail about Hans Ulrich Obrist (named “Hurricane” by his friends) and the curator’s frenzied correspondence and production of discourse. According to Kissick, who was Obrist’s intern at the Serpentine Gallery London, the curator par excellence ended up wearing therapy magnets on his temples for blowing so much wind. I heard from an artist once, who visited Obrist, that the walls of his office were a constellation of post-it notes and yet to-do lists.
Similarly to Kissick’s midlife memoir, art critic Dan Fox came out with a book called Limbo [alternative name: mid-life crisis] on Fitzcarraldo Editions, which also bemoans this thing called the artworld. Yet Fox’s is a journey of sobriety, becoming clear-eyed to the drives and ambitions of the artworld posse of dealers, collectors, curators, critics, artists, which he was part and progenitor of, and all the greed, ego, and envy that comes with getting ahead in the artworld. Whereas Kissick is romanticising circa 2008 artworld, and the hedonistic and market-funded derangement and psychological outcomes of such lively and relentless production, including Obrist’s temple therapy magnets.
The song "Stop Making Sense" by Talking Heads comes to mind ironically when I think about Kissick’s perspective and ideology. His essay opens up with his mother losing her legs on the way to an exhibition at the Barbican, and then asking in her hospital bed, “Was it worth losing my legs?” Kissick answers, “No”. From this unbelievable abject premise, which is removed of all traumatic significance in its delivery or denial (it is in excess of context, and speaks to Kissick’s fantasy of an excessive artworld), he then proceeds to describe the exhibition and its allegiance to identity politics and unwinds the narrative from this disavowed traumatic moment.
Kissick goes on a bit; Harper’s editors have a lot to answer for the essay’s ruminating excesses. His main point is that contemporary art, as the byline explicitly states, has been destroyed by politics, especially identity politics:
censorship at the barbican
repression at the barbican
racism at the barbican
genocide at the barbican
Kissick writes: “It was the most depressing exhibition I had ever seen at the gallery, hardly worth a visit, let alone losing one’s legs.” Kissick’s phrasing here is loose and lacks reflexive criticism. Once again it is in excess of its context. It is almost as if he needs to inject his prose and recollections with abjection in order to write against a grain that is running parallel not perpendicular to his argument.
I acquiesce to personal ideologies and spar with the status quo from time to time, believing, like Susan Sontag, that cultural critics (and artists) need to take a dissenting position. This is much easier to do in the artworld with its contradictory and collusive relationship with the market as a luxury good. When I invoke Sontag and her essay ‘Against Interpretation’, and her suggestion of erotic “description” as a way to consume and experience art, I realise that Sontag is a formalist hedonist, and not so far from Kissick in manifesto. I accepted long ago that the artworld is a bad place. Yet my hope was that in this bad place, good art could somehow serve as a resistance to the capital of culture. Artists would somehow make good art, even though they were colluding and desiring the very thing they were resisting. This is fundamental to the tension between desire and resistance, creativity, and the anxiety between two poles.
As the artworld continues to apologise for its past hedonistic formalist tendencies with what seems an equally and exclusive hedonism (in excessive terms) in its political agenda in terms of public funding or biennale representation, past artists like Matthew Barney or Cindy Sherman seem like excessives in their deranged mythologies of self. Even David Rimenelli’s Instagram feed seems excessive in its adulterated appropriation of empty and anachronistic erotic images of art that say more about experimental form than the politics of the artist or originary context of the artwork.
Dean Kissick’s essay being named “The Painted Protest”, it is interesting to think about painting’s counter-position in relation to this hyper identity-politics being affirmed in the spaces of art, public and private, painting being an object closer to a luxury good for the rich to hang on their phat walls or flip on the secondary market, far, far away from the dirty hands of the painter. Is painting hedonistic? Painters are not protesting by inhabiting new physical territories. They are being marginalised in a different way, dreaming of gallery representation or migrating en masse to Instagram. Douglas Hyde Gallery, once a bastion of contemporary painting in Ireland, hasn’t supported painting in any significant way since the new administration moved in. Painters’ last resort—without resistance—is the island of commodification. Is this hedonistic? I think hedonism is just another word for excess, whether politically motivated or market-driven.
