Just before Biden took over the reigns in 2021, President Trump, at the end of his first term, pardoned fine art dealer Helly Nahmad who was running a gallery in the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Ave. He’d been arrested in a sting operation that connected him to a high-stakes poker ring, the Russian mafia and a conservative estimate of around $3B in fine art. Nahmad remains a key player in the global art trade. Let us backtrack and remind ourselves that performance art was, and still is, a rules based practice:
1. No rehearsal. 2. No repetition. 3. No predictable end.
It’s crucial to exorcise the ‘this is the worst it will ever be’ demon, cackles Keller on X. Yesterday’s post-internet practice is today’s deep fried cultural commentary. Artists like Keller have come to define the past fifteen years of contemporary art’s leading edge by exploiting the uncanny valley between conceptual substance and high production value. Ryder Ripps, for example, did the PornHub logo. In 2008, you could throw anything on the internet the way you could a wall: for no reason, just to see if it sticks. If it does, there’s porn of it.
The Ideology of the White Cube is as aesthetically deregulated as the California Ideology is politically ephemeralized. Not even DEI legislation applies to the independent and non-partisan entity whose use and abuse of art history extends from 300,000 B.C.E. to a $340M operating budget. Art lets you throw money on the wall just to see if it sticks, and if it does, we call it philanthropy. But if it sticks and its not good, you know it when you see it. And if you can’t unsee it, you know what it means. But in 2025, it would seem, the mistakes are more costly. The Jogging catalyzed a global trend in the visual substance of forward-forcing digital from K-Hole to Kanye, post-internet was punk. Slop is pop.
Some speculate that the AI Slop Ugliness Theory is rooted in lossiness; Ted Chiang says that Chat GPT is just a lossy execution of the entire internet: “The more you copy that same thing, the more ‘lossy’ it gets. The more generations, the more loss, the more distortion. The underlying work becomes increasingly unrecognizable until it’s lost completely after thousands of generations and replaced with something totally ‘new',” (Eno’s Ugliness Theory and Sloptimism)
For The End of Art History, Mark Signorelli turns his face towards German Romanticism and away from the post-war situation: “Poetry becomes incoherent, music atonal, painting and sculpture jarring,” Signorelli laments, “Art becomes a medium of disillusion.” It might be a while before we can tell which political camp is taking the self-guided tour through a self-imposed labyrinth of pain and which side is playing handball with Rosie and her five sisters. On the IQ in Bio Right, housing, income, employment, healthcare, debt: these are existential plagues, not symptoms of socioeconomic disorder. An object loss most profound. In IM—1776, Signorelli polishes love’s labor lost: “Looking to the volk for vitality has been foreclosed forever.”
In 1971, Vito Acconci performed Claim at 93 Grand St. “I was maybe nine years old when Truman very justifiably fired Macarthur,” the artist reminisced. For Claim, Acconci sat at the bottom of the stairway saying I don’t want people to come down here. Every time a visitor entered the gallery and tried to go downstairs he’d start swinging the crowbar. “But he came up with great phrases like ‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” Acconci recalled. “If kids could have voted, Macarthur would have become president. Whereas Truman was a sissy, a guy with glasses.”
Seedbed is a stunning example of how technology can be used to enhance, rather than supplant, the value of labor. This is work about stagflation. This is work about liquidity. This is work about doing more with less. Nothing comes closer to what techno-optimists envision as “a discovery machine, a form of intelligence— an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.” By concealing himself underneath the floor, Acconci’s hand job is artistic criticism because it’s a self-description of the system. This is a work of art that requires no illusion and so is bereft, therefore, of disillusion. It’s a fucking fantasy by definition.
Here’s what Claude can’t grasp and that The End of Art History won’t see: in times of Treason, the landscapes are beautiful. Art can exploit reality by generating its own order that unfolds along the lines of necessity. Between 1966 and 1972, the Vietnam War weighed like an apotheosis between a communism that never existed, because it was an idea, and a perversity that can only be understood in terms of the fictional hilarity of Hogan’s Heroes. The intervention of the difference between seeing and speaking into audio-visual communication was a re-introduction of perception into the mass public. The “situation” in Southeast Asia charged the national interest with the role of the enabler. When viewers entered the empty gallery, Acconci’s presence “came to hand” as an object that announced itself neither as culture or as capital, but as volatility and inevitability. The artist reproduced the effect a silent majority heard but not seen; as a floating conduit created from cause (lifting the boot).
Seedbed was an explicit assault on meaning as private consumption, as well as a critique of the theatre of foreign policy after WWII. Intellectuals who knew what happened, in 1956, in Budapest, understood that 1968 in France and 1969 in the United States were a joke. The mass public didn’t understand why they cancelled Hogan’s Heroes— withoutwithdrawing, first, from a conflict that was more embarrassing than being told when to laugh. The division in perception as experienced by the mass public, on the one side, and the bipartisan constituencies, on the other— “the good war,” of WWII, and the war that was ultimately reduced to the refusal to lose— was technologically mediated in the 1960’s. In the 1970’s, the Vietnam War was technologically augmented. Practicing his monologue and avoiding the draft, Acconci forms and takes form from that which Signorelli reveres in Hölderlin, “the rhythm of praise, certain linguistic structures, and a sense of longing for transcendent meaning.”
In Silicon Valley, all my friends are socially liberal and aesthetically conservative. The future of the world is not a real problem because the future of the world is not your future. If you’re confronted with the question of “what does this power mean to you?” and all of a sudden, it gets dark, it’s not because you are Enlightened. You have been standing in line at a California DMV for long enough to want to be free of power.
In the art world, my friends are socially conservative and aesthetically liberal. The future of the world belongs to whomever gets there first to call the shots (this is why the Spring Season fashion lines debut in the fall of the previous year.) Real problems are heavy drinkers. If you’re confronted with the question of “what does this power mean to you?” and suddenly, you go sane on command, it’s not because you're Enlightened. You have been a friend of Bill for long enough to want to be free of power.
I believe the highest form of art is drinking beer with your friends. Because there’s a man underneath the floorboards. And you can’t see him, but you can hear him. He’s electing the President. He’s shaking hands with the Bishop. He’s practicing the monologue. He’s a builder. He’s doing this to you, he’s doing this with you and he’s begging the question: Can neoliberalism speak?