art is running out of good ideas

Dana Schutz. Photograph PA WIRE/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES. Artwork © Dana Schutz.

Recently, Dean Kissick penned an essay for The Spectator entitled “The Rise of Bad Figurative Painting.” In it, he laments the proliferation of the recent trend dubbed last summer by Alex Greenberger as “zombie figuration,” the more narrative, equally derivative sibling to the mid-2010’s zombie formalism. “Bad figurative painting is a renunciation of art’s radical avant-garde potential, but also of traditional ideas of sublime and transcendental beauty. It’s polite, unremarkable, middle of the road,” he claims. Artists who fall into this category, according to Kissick, are just about any figurative painter currently accepted by the wider art market: Dana Schutz, KAWS, Julie Curtiss, Emily Mae Smith, and somehow, even Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. 

Longevity of the movement aside, one phrase in Kissick’s article irked me enough to be sitting here writing this response: “It’s been clear for a while that art is running out of ideas.” Like the art Kissick vehemently rejects for its inability to say anything new, the notion that “art is running out of ideas” is a tired claim that has not once proven to be true. It’s an offshoot of the centuries-long, seemingly immortal debate over whether or not painting is “dead,” an unoriginal repackaging of art historical theory in much the same way Kissick claims members of this zombie figuration merely repackage the art of the past. “From today, painting is dead,” academic painter Paul Delaroche declared upon seeing a Daguerreotype for the first time. Yet, after it apparently died, painting gave us Impressionism. Cubism. Surrealism. Abstract Expressionism. Pop Art. You get the idea.

Now, this is by no means a complete repudiation of Kissick’s claims. I would wager few people looked at Dana Schutz’s Trump Descending an Escalator (2017)—which is highlighted in the article as a prime example of all that is wrong with this latest artistic trend—and thought it in any way subtle or particularly imaginative. I, too, lament the hold both social media and the art market’s insatiability have on artistic production. Think of how many more square paintings you see now compared to five or ten years ago, sized to fit just so above a couch and effortlessly on an Instagram grid. There is a homogenization building throughout these spaces that is deeply troubling, and Kissick is right to question the lack of nuance seen not only in art but in just about every field imaginable. 

But does this mean art is running out of ideas, doomed to exist as some kind of feedback loop, a rerun of a sitcom you’ve seen too many times? I don’t think so. As Seph Rodney eloquently notes in his essay for Hyperallergic, “What People Mean When They Say ‘Painting is Dead’,” to say that something is dead, as opposed to someone, is to seek confirmation that that something is indeed undergoing a permanent transformation; it is a kind of grief. The “ideas” art is running out of are the ones Kissick recognizes. For better or for worse, these artists have altered the artistic landscape, and Kissick’s declaration seems to function as a lamentation of what can never again be retrieved by this alteration, a loss of the “good ol’ days” (which, if the rest of history is any indication, probably never existed to begin with).  

I can’t help but wonder exactly what good a statement such as this does for broader art historical discourse, other than perhaps to make these works more avant-garde in their deplorability. After all, what noteworthy movements have not received their share of vitriol? Critics thought that “wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished” when compared to Impressionist paintings. Even its champion, Mallarmé, felt that Monet, Pissarro, and Siseley “paint wondrously alike; indeed, a rather superficial observer at a pure and simple exhibition of Impressionism would take all their works to be those of one man…”. Duchamp’s Fountain was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists. The Abstract Expressionists were “irascible.” The art historian Michael Fried was “not at all sure that even the best of Warhol’s work can much outlast the journalism on which it is forced to depend.” 

Will these zombie figurationists withstand the test of time like the predecessors they tap for inspiration? It’s far too early to tell. But a personal distaste for a movement does not make you “so smart” and these artists “so stupid.” While grief, even in this context, is nothing to take lightly, it should not be mistaken for a value judgment. 

Image: Dana Schutz. Photo by Bob Collier, PA WIRE/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES. Artwork © Dana Schutz