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From: MCM
Date: 25 Apr 2010
Time: 12:33:12 -0500
There's no great art because art is at a historically determined crisis moment. It's been playing out a developmental process of which it's at the frayed end. For the last fifty years or so, the main subject of art has been its increasing protean anythingness. No one is shocked by this anymore except the very stupid, but no one knows what it's for either. What was freedom has become oppressive, which we can see from the way it exists in an atmosphere of such bland, shoulder-shrugging conventionalism. 'Well, that's the way it is', say the young graduates on the Goldsmiths show and thousands of others, sounding like on-trend shoppers, prior to a litany of things you've got to do to get by, none of which have anything to to do with artistic quality, an apparently dissipated concept, or radical questioning. As Zizek will tell you, this is 'ideology at its finest', the moment where a certain set of parameters have simply been accepted as fundamental reality. The one thing we can know, when David Mabb talks about 'competing ideologies' in the Goldsmiths studios, is that there really is no ideological competition. Far more than politics or economics, art has reached the Fukuyaman end of its history, arriving at the dead point of being judged only according to the pure contingency of its value in the market. Perhaps more than any other aspect of the market, the whole thing runs on commodity fetishism.