Artforum Wrecks Itself

Art-world progressivism is not just pining for the fjords. Also, we conclude our reading of Art Can Help by Robert Adams.

The image adorning the cover of the December 2024 issue of Artforum, the first to come out since Election Day, is a detail from an installation by Sofía Córdova called Green is A Solace, A Promise of Peace (where small birds hide and dodge and lift their plaintive rallying cries) from 2022. The mediums include “taxidermied doves, parakeets, and canaries, hair dye, brass, [and] birch wood.” It also illustrates an Artforum editor’s note by Tina Rivers Ryan titled “The Wreck” in which she communicated with the presumably disconcerted Córdova regarding the state of America, where we denizens supposedly find it “impossible to disown the vile bigotry that portends destruction like a monster rising from the depths.” Ryan invoked Promise of Peace as emblematic of our predicament as seen from a certain intellectual set:

In Córdova’s show, an installation of taxidermied birds colored with green Manic Panic hair dye (including the resolute dove that glowers from the cover of this issue) invited viewers to reconsider our anthropocentric panic over climate change, which Trump will now accelerate: What if we viewed climate-induced mutation as a form of adaptation, resulting from the ongoing process of “metabolizing harm,” as Córdova suggested to me? If American “revolutions,” including the MAGA revolution, often take the form of heroic narratives driven by white male protagonists, perhaps communal “evolution” might provide another model.

I also see it as an apt symbol, but in another way: art-world progressivism as a stuffed bird. As of November 2024, it is the Norwegian Blue Parrot of political tendencies. Its salesperson is trapped in a series of increasingly outlandish claims that it is still alive, having assured the buyer that it was just “tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.” The customer is forced to insist that the bird is no more, ceased to be, gone to meet his maker, stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, joined in the choir invisible, and so on. That an artist has taken it upon herself to dye the poor creature a hue alien to its nature using Manic Panic, the hair coloration brand of choice for a long-dead 1980s punk scene, only heightens the sense of poseur contrivance. Remarkable bird, squire—beau’iful plumage!

Monty Python, Parrot Sketch (source)

Progressivism, more broadly, continues. We should instinctually favor the oppressed over their oppressors and want new and better things to come into the world. The continuity of tradition should be regularly spiced with innovation. Old wrongs should be put right.

Art world progressivism, in contrast, is dead. It is a self-congratulatory pose by an existentially vacuous elite and the climbers who want to enter their ranks. Art-worlders are not the worst form of postliberal progressive—that would be Antifa—but they are the most pathetic. Ryan could be an avatar for the AWFL. She has five—five!—degrees in art history and seems to have passed from academia to the museums to the masthead of Artforum without ever encountering the real world. Nevertheless, she too thinks she’s fighting fascism.

[I]f advocating for art in the same breath as social justice sometimes felt like a luxury that few could afford, the triumphant return of fascism—which targets artists and intellectuals for a reason—has now made it a necessity. As I noted in my first editor’s letter back in June, my model of politics, based on my understanding of how power operates, is to throw everything at the wall, from protesting to organizing, building new models, and making art. We also need criticism—not as a distraction from the hard work of protecting our communities and working towards change, but, as I noted in my November letter, “as an active and even activist practice pitted against historical amnesia, superficial engagement, and ironic detachment (all of which further the most dangerous ideological agendas).” Think about who stands to benefit most from the withering of creative and critical practices; let’s not give them what they want.

Dr. Ryan, you are not fighting fascism. You are fighting people who remember what butter cost three years ago and don’t know how to pronounce “Latinx.” You are fighting people who can’t afford a house, much less anything for sale in your magazine. You’re fighting people who still don’t understand why a Covid vaccine shot was required for them to keep their jobs but not for an immigrant to enter their country. You are fighting people whom the government censored and the media betrayed. You are fighting gays who don’t accept your gender politics and ethnic minorities who don’t accept your racial politics. You are fighting Jews who thought that your so-called antiracism would include them. You are fighting the veritable human rainbow featured in the jubilant Trump Dance compilation reel. Every time you call them fascists, bigots, and colonizers, as you do in this essay, you look like a bigger jerk.

With all due respect to Dr. Ryan and her five art history degrees, the longer this kind of thing goes on without mentioning class issues…

How do we survive and build in the wreckage that palpably surrounds us? How do we continue to fight for the security of minoritized people, let alone advocate for the ideals of democracy or justice, under a second Trump presidency, when we already have to imagine that his administration will deport immigrants, threaten trans lives, destroy queer families, disregard the disabled, further limit abortion access, hollow out public education, gut regulations, tilt the courts, criminalize dissent, arrest political opponents, compromise elections, abolish term limits, and abet foreign despots . . . among countless other horrors cooked up by his advisors and mega-donors? 

…the more it looks like the product of immense privilege. Leave aside how much of the above list applies to the current administration.¹ She would have us disdain American revolutions as “heroic narratives driven by white male protagonists.” But there is no obvious reason to prefer “communal evolution” driven by overeducated white female protagonists like Ryan. Revolution or evolution, any change worth having would drastically alter the universities from which she obtained her five art history degrees, the museums that subsequently employed her, and the increasingly slender hobby rag where she serves as editor-in-chief. That would in turn downgrade the status she enjoys in her milieu.

Artforum is a service that delivers advertisements from millionaires to billionaires. It tries to dignify the exercise with insertions of the most comfortable variety of leftist pabulum. Trans lives and queer families are not in much danger from the upcoming administration, as evidenced by the last time it was in power. But in an environment where both the majority and the plurality have learned to dismiss sanctioned narratives, such as the Harris-Walz campaign, as obvious twaddle, Artforum’s credibility rather is. That’s not ascendant fascism—it’s arguably ascendant liberation. Though it apparently feels like ascendant fascism to the stewards of the sanctioned narratives. To quote Ryan, let’s not give them what they want.

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As an aside, and to wrap up the Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Art Can Help by Robert Adams, the art-world progressive’s accusation of fascism is nothing if not a prolonged squawk. For the most part, Adams’s book is excellent. But when he characterized (p. 53) the pictures of Judith Joy Ross as “helpful both for the evident faith inherent in the artist’s seamless construction and because they awaken us from indifference as our country moves toward a fascist state,” my patience for his politics—particularly the romantic environmentalism and his tendency to personalize any failing in the American experiment—wore out all at once. Upon reading that line I thought, fine, the book was published in 2017, a year or two into the first Trump administration, and such laments had become commonplace. At the bottom of the page, I learned that the essay first appeared in Aperture in 2006, two years into the Bush administration. The actions of that administration were appalling and I credit them with turning me into a libertarian. But they were not fascist, just as Trump 45 was not fascist and Trump 47 will not be fascist.

In a touching afterword composed from notes made on the occasion of the artist’s 2012 retrospective at the Yale University Art Gallery, he confesses to a temperamental pessimism. “Human beings are tragic,” he writes on page 86. “Evidence includes the history of my own country, the United States.” Ten million migrants did not cross into the US illegally during the Biden administration to take part in an American tragedy. They came to escape truly tragic countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Progressives were outraged when Trump demeaned Haiti. But if Haiti deserves our respect, so does the United States.

Adams has no patience for aesthetic nihilism (see his denigration of John Baldessari on page 86) or the art industry’s slowness to sort wheat from chaff (p. 81, regarding Mary Peck), and it drives him toward laudable conclusions. He cites the magnificent Wendell Berry (p. 87):

The best art involves a complex giving of honor. It gives honor to the materials that are being used in the work, therefore giving honor to God; it gives honor to the people for whom the art is made; and it gives honor to the maker, the responsible worker. In that desire to give honor, the artist takes on the obligation to be responsibly connected both to the human community and to nature.

Unlike Berry, Adams’s sensitivity is comorbid with a gloomy and shallow progressivism that implicitly judges his fellow creatures in a manner that presumes more responsibility for them than is any man’s true lot, and less faith in them than that sense of responsibility would require. Wikipedia notes that the young Adams was active in the Methodist church. The attitude of the older Adams stinks of the Social Gospel. Dr. Ryan’s does as well. The Social Gospel presumes that it’s the job of Protestants to expiate their dramatic surfeits of guilt through political reforms, whether the rest of us want them or not. The spiritual heirs of Gilded Age Protestantism, though usually lapsed as Christians, continue the condescension.² We would rather be taken as we are. Page 75:

Alfred Stieglitz said that “all true things are equal to one another,” and in that he spoke for most artists. They are convinced, despite having to sort through daily practicalities by triage, that everything is of immeasurable consequence.

Adams can summon eyes of love. It redeems his book.

As for Artforum, we deserve a better art magazine. But I already made a serious attempt at supplying one. I leave that problem to others. Instead, I’ve returned from the festivities in Philadelphia artistically refreshed, and looking forward to making some culture. For Dr. Ryan the wreck is America. For me the wreck is Artforum and what it represents. I feel at peace watching it founder and sink in the distance.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Working Space by Frank Stella. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. This could be an essay in itself, but to pick something: The Merrick Garland Department of Justice responded to the election results by confiscating the phone and electronics of the CEO of Polymarket in an early morning raid on his house. No charges have been filed. Given similar spurious cases pursued by the Garland DoJ against its political enemies, the FBI is probably going to leak his personal information and email history to the press to discredit Polymarket and create an expensive legal nuisance for the CEO.

2. See my essay from 2022, Secular Deracinated WASPism.