Art happens at the hinge between right now (this instant) and popular assimilation. There is a very short lag time between these two since there are guards on the watchtowers scouring the countryside for the new, the different, and the barely palatable. Most everything outside of that narrow hinge is artifact or pop product. There are aspects of art that may always remain art, or resurface as art. I count Jackson Pollock’s work as an artifact of the time. Even Matthew Barney’s Cremaster videos are, regardless of merit, artifact. But there remains in their works, a seed of earnestness and difference that belongs to art and probably always will. Like aesthetic Tupperware™, it can keep things fresh.

In a way it is the style that gets stale, whereas the real guts of the work keeps it alive. Concerning the surface treatment of art by artists Hal Foster wrote in his essay “Against Pluralism”:

Fashion answers both the need to innovate and the need to change nothing; it recycles styles, and the result is often a composite — the stylish rather than style as such.

Such is the style of much art today: our new tradition of the eclectic-neo. Ten years ago Harold Rosenberg saw the advent of such art: he termed it dejavunik, by which he meant art that plays upon our desire to be mildly shocked, piqued really, by the already assimilated dressed up as the new.

In a post-modern condition there is a ubiquity of permissions and a desire to sort through the centuries of history and information, the amount of which was never so readily available. This combination of permission and need for contextualization has ironically lead artists to recycle styles in hopes of reclaiming or understanding history. But this is mostly a reclamation of style in hopes that by talking the talk, the walk will be assumed. Hal Foster went on to say:

Modern Art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends to assume historical forms — out of context and reified. Parodic or straight, these quotations plead for the importance, even the traditional status, of the new art. In certain quarters this is seen as a “return to history”; but it is in fact a profoundly ahistorical enterprise, and the result is often “aesthetic pleasure as false consciousness, or vice versa.”

What seems to be lacking in the art landscape is art. There is an earth’s lifetime of artifacts and institutions filled with cheap, touristy knock-offs that may look like other artifacts, smell like other artifacts, and may well be artifacts because of their artifice, but lack the oomph of art. (Pardon the use of onomatopoeic “oomph”, but it is difficult to quantify what makes a thing alive versus dead without resorting to guttural noises). Artists have been mimicking the avant-garde since they garnered the name “avant-garde,” yet is still passes for avant-garde in some circles because it has all the visual earmarks, but it mostly is missing real chutzpah. About this, Foster commented:

We have nearly come to the point where transgression is a given. Site-specific works do not automatically disrupt our notion of context, and alternative spaces seem nearly the norm. This latter case is instructive, for when the modern museum retreated from contemporary practice, it largely passed the function of accreditation on to alternative spaces — the very function against which these spaces were established. Today ephemeral art works are common even as ad hoc groups and movements. All seek marginality even though it cannot be preserved (thus the pathos of the enterprise). Certainly, marginality is not now given as critical, for in effect the center has invaded the periphery and vice versa. Here a strange double-bind occurs. For example, a once marginal institution proposes a show of a marginal group: the museum does so to (re)gain at least the aura of marginality, and the marginal group agrees… only to lose its marginality.

Part of the problem consists of the institutions that are “there to help.” Museums and galleries are limited in their ability and scope, architecturally and financially. That is all fine and good if the institutions and the represented artists are all in on the gag, but most are not. The in-vogue size of the walls, height of the ceilings, and the presence of track-lighting all publicize to artists what is expected of them — friendly product.

Marcel Broodthaers wrote on the cover of Interfunktionen, Fall 1974 that “artistic theory will be functioning for the artistic product in the same way as the artistic product is functioning as advertising for the rule under which it is produced.”

To further drive this concept home, I’ll point to Dave Hickey, who said to a room full of art professionals in response to the “Curating Now” symposium, 2000: “We all want artists to do what we want them to do to facilitate our practice.”

Artists produce artifacts because that is what institutions primarily deal in. Museums are too slow to respond to art while it’s still alive and has not yet passed into the realm of artifact. So museums show taxidermied work — a fashionable style-skin stretched over a familiar form, gussied up and domesticated for the general public so as not to endanger government funding.

This is a bit cynical. Art is occasionally exhibited outside the studio. Curators and gallery owners do spot things from their watchtowers that can straddle art and artifact well enough that their consciences are assuaged and their public is sated. This is rare. Possible, but rare.