Mood over Content

After art’s artistic turn, mood is the new benchmark for quality in contemporary art, positing a philosophically sustainable alternative to spectacle and newness.

ince the beginning of the decade, much art has become artistic again. Meaning, it has ceased to be about itself or some designated topic. Art has shed the self-consciousness of the avant-garde tradition, instead veering towards traditional media, towards expression. What happened to Sturtevant, the Pictures Generation, Institutional Critique, exasperated professors will ask of their millennial – and younger – students, who, in their turn, are investing in a historical continuity beyond modernism, in sincerity, even spirituality.

Spirituality, I think, is the point on which the current generational divide turns. For millennials, the state is no longer a viable religion, as it was for our parents – neither is socialism, formalism, or deconstruction – and within a decade identity politics, too, has been exhausted, yielding only the dogmatism of religion without any of its existential depth. As I wrote last year in an essay for Kunstkritikk, criticality is, by now, its own form of capitalist kitsch, and this to the point that even turns towards embodiment or affect have felt like intellectual contrivances rather than art. Criticality is a press release, a funding application; it is less likely to make a work of art more complex than more legible, digestible, and sellable.

While, in my previous treatise, I partly lamented this new art’s departure from more overtly intellectual traditions – as well as its seeming lack of criteria – I also suggested that it might present critics with a chance to stake more definite claims. My intention here is to be less on the fence. Quality, now that I’ve thought about it, is in fact even less of a mystery when it comes to artistic art than that of the schools of information or attitude, where discourse and networks often act as smoke-screens. Given its less intellectually convoluted relation to its own medium – indeed, to the notion of art-making altogether – artistic art offers a moment of ontological simplicity in which to consider what we want and need from art, and how our lives with and within it can become meaningful and sustainable. And here I do not mean ecologically but existentially; I mean recovering a way of relating to our experiences and creativity that is not extractivist.

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