Letter from the Editor – Issue 17
It would be nice if, at the end of a year in contemporary art, we could point to this or that aesthetic trend, this or that novel movement, this rise or that fall in a particular style, but, alas, the art world is such a desiccated husk that what we’re left with is little more than another opportunity to clichély describe its corpse. Still, 2024’s art world could look significant in retrospect for a few reasons.
The first is that the end of the Fed’s zero interest rate policy was finally felt by the art world. Overleveraged galleries closed, their owners and their contact lists absorbed into larger organizations; overleveraged artists left newly renovated studio spaces; overleveraged art fairs closed or merged with larger ones; and overleveraged collectors realized that they’d better really love that painting they bought five years ago as an investment piece, because it’s unlikely to be resold for a profit anytime soon.
As a millennial in the arts, low to no interest rates have made the only art world my generation has ever known. Yes, the rise of the MFA predates this period, as does the prominence of the market relative to other aspects of the art world. Still, the spike in young people exchanging the newly apparent instability of a professional degree for the “professionalization” and ever-increasing amounts of debt offered by an MFA post-2008 was significant. The climb in asset prices seen during the pandemic dwarfed even the scale of speculation associated with the zombie-formalism trend of the mid-2010s. This was the hyper-globalized art world looked back at with nostalgia by Dean Kissick in his recent Harper’s article, the art world that Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach thought would last forever, generating a constantly bleeding edge of avant-garde innovation and expanding contact lists, an art world of infinite fairs at the end of history.
It is no surprise that an industry running on jet fumes and the vapidity of the novel would yield to one urgently seeking aesthetic value in every detail of an artist’s biography or political affiliations. The second art world trend in 2024 of note has been a resurgent call for criticality, led most vocally by Sean Tatol and his Manhattan Art Review, against what he calls the “subjective absolutism” allowed by contemporary criticism and curation. In a year when the so-called experts, all properly Ivy-educated and institutionally credentialed, insisted again and again that we not believe our lying eyes—That’s not genocide! That mean, doddering old man is doing just fine! The economy is great, stupid!—a reactionary and justified rise in critical voices across the media spectrum is understandable.
This shift also coincided with the biggest art world story of the year: censorship of artists and curators by institutions cowed by their board members, major donors, and executive staff. Some of liberalism’s highest values—individual rights, freedom of speech, the press, assembly, etc.—have been so twisted by those actors that pretend to be their standard-bearers over the past year that it is hard to believe anyone in our generation or younger would, in fact, keep believing their lying eyes, and continue to turn to them for guidance or acceptance.
All these things point towards a new shape to the art world and a reshuffling of its social relations. It will be a long time coming, but we’re here for it, and to help it come into being.
Here’s what to look forward to in this issue: Amanda Joy Anderson levels criticism at one of the Buffalo AKG’s recent public projects; McKenna Gray covers a group exhibition curated by Dallas Fellini; Erika Verhagen makes a contribution to the growing body of literature about the crisis of criticism by trying to figure out what works would make for a good climb in a survey of exhibitions across Cooper Cole, MOCA Toronto, Daniel Faria, and Joys; Danni Shen profiles Cecilia Lu and her most recent body of work in Ithaca; and M. Delmonico Connolly covers the long career of Buffalo’s William C. Maggio, currently being celebrated in a retrospective at the Burchfield Penney. Online, Ashley Culver continues her coverage of Toronto’s alternative arts scene.
See you in 2025!
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Editor-in-Chief
Published by
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
Editor-in-Chief
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Executive Director
Emily Ebba Reynolds
Copy Editor
Emily E. Mangione
Design
Mark Yappueying
Production Assistant & Photo Editor
wavy
Contributing Writers
Ashley Culver
Ava Danieu
Sophia Oppel
Kit Xiong
Leo Zausen
